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The
LS-120 ('SuperDisk') is a drive for 120MB (formatted) media, which is
also meant as a replacement for the floppy drive. The internal IDE variant
seems to be the most popular one in desktop PCs. IDE floppies are handled
by theide-floppy driver.
BIOS settings
Make sure your BIOS supports booting from an LS-120.
Most modern BIOSes (AMI, Award, Phoenix) do. One important thing is to remove
all floppy support: set detection on the floppy
controller to 'none' and remove the floppy option from the boot devices chain
and replace it with the LS-120. Otherwise the drive will act just like any
other IDE removable which spoils half the fun ;-). False BIOS settings are
indicated by an 'ATAPI UNKNOWN' message during boot.
Accessing
The disks are preformatted with FAT and have no partition
tables. Like with a floppy, you access the disk as a whole (no partition
number after device file number). Example: If the drive is connected as slave
to the second IDE port, you would access it via '/dev/hdd' (i.e. mount
/dev/hdd -t auto /mnt/disk or add an appropriate line to '/etc/fstab').
Chances are that Mandrake has already done this for you ;-).
Of course you can reformat it to your liking, but then you have to use partition
numbers to access the disk.
Booting
120MB is just the right size for a small portable GNU/Linux
installation. The appropriate 'lilo.conf' should look like this (from linuxrouter.org):
boot=/dev/hda
compact
disk=/dev/hda bios=0
install=/floppy/boot.b
map=/floppy/map
image=/floppy/linux
label=Linux
append="load_ramdisk=1"
initrd=/floppy/root.bin
ramdisk=8192
The line "disk=/dev/hda bios=0" is what does the trick to make it boot the
LS-120.
Making a simple boot disk for the current system seems
to be a
major pain. The mkbootdisk script provided with Mandrake
doesn't accept any disks in a LS-120 (neither 120MB nor 1.44MB) and even
if you get around this you are confronted with the problem that the LS-120
disk isn't where everyone expects it to be, that is /dev/fd0, and that it
has different drive parameters, and - finally - the ide-floppy
driver is compiled as a module, while you'd need it to be in the kernel.
So you'll run into LiLo load errors or kernel panics.
You might want to try this patched version instead
(remember to make it executable). Please tell me if it works.
Furthermore there seem to be problems when using 'supermount'
with these devices.
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These drives come with "100MB" and "250MB" media (formatted
size is smaller). They will be configured automatically during installation,
the (linked) device file is '/dev/zip', mount directory is '/mnt/zip'.
Accessing
ZIP disks are partitioned. For Mac-compatibility the
data partition is the fourth (i.e. '/dev/hd[x]4'). Everything else can be
done using the standard tools (fdisk, mke2fs, 'supermount'
etc) or the 'mtools' package.
One program you might be interested in is Lomega which copies some functions
of Iomega's Windows Tools.
You should be able to boot them, if your BIOS supports
booting from disks others than the first one.
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ORB from Castlewood
uses "2.2GB" disks (formatted size smaller).
Caveats: the IDE-ORB drive can be switched between 'fixed' (ATA mode) and
'removable' (ATAPI mode) mode. It is shipped in 'fixed' mode. To make it 'removable',
you have to use the Windows/Mac ORB tools. Otherwise you won't be able to
swap disks during run-time but must power down your computer to do so.
If you use these disks for important backups, backup twice (well, you should
do that anyway ;-)). Reports on the reliability of ORB disks are mixed.
Configuration
You should have the ORB drive as master /single on the
second IDE port. Castlewood advises you explicitly not to use its drive as
a slave to any ATAPI device (since you can switch from ATAPI to ATA mode
with it, I'd guess), although it comes preconfigured as a slave
device.
Access
You can access the drive after boot via '/dev/hdc'.
Create a mount directory for it (e.g. mkdir /mnt/orb). ORB drives
are pre-formatted to have their data on the first logical partition,
i.e. '/dev/hdc5'. So the proper mount command would be mount /dev/hdc5
-t auto /mnt/orb. Add an appropriate line to '/etc/fstab', preferably
let 'supermount' do the mounting.
To eject disks, use the eject /dev/[device] command.
You should be able to boot off them, if your BIOS supports
booting from disks others than the first one.
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IDE Tape Drives are controlled by the ide-tape
driver and are detected automatically (like all IDE devices). Currently only
one IDE tape drive per system is supported.
Access
Although you will see something like hdd: Seagate
STT8000A, ATAPI TAPE drive on startup, '/dev/hdd' is not
the device file for handling the tape. It is '/dev/ht0' (rewind on close)
or '/dev/nht0' (no rewind on close).
Tapes are usually used unmounted with the mt command
and archiving programs like tar or afio (You can
get an afio RPM from the 'RPMS2' directory of your favorite Cooker server).
Example: mt -f /dev/ftape retension rewinds the tape. Readman
mt for more (I've never used a tape drive, so I can be of no help
here).
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 SCSI
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