There are a couple of things that need to be checked. First, look at the macdisks.Solaris file located in the System Folder in the Preferences folder. This file can be edited with TeachText or vi.
You need to enable the floppy drive by entering whether the drive is read-only or read-write, and provide the path name. Since most Suns have one floppy disk drive, only the floppy0 entry has to be enabled. If your Sun has two floppy drives there is also an entry for floppy1. The entry for the floppy drives usually looks like this:
floppy0:rw:/dev/rdiskette
floppy1:ignore
It is possible to have the floppy drive at floppy1. If so, set floppy0:ignore and enable floppy1. (If the Sun workstation does not have any floppy drives, set both line entries to :ignore.)
Next, make sure you installed the "Volume Manager Extensions" when installing MAE. The "Volume Manager Extensions" must be installed as root. MAE Volume Manager is software that is used on Sun workstations to make it easier to use removable media devices. MAE runs a UNIX process on the workstation called "vold". To see if the Volume Manager is running, do the following:
1) From the UNIX workstation console type:
ps -ef
2) Look for a UNIX process called "vold". That is the Volume Manager
process.
To see if the Volume Manager Extensions have been installed, do the following:
1) Type: cat /etc/rmmount.conf
During the MAE installation this file will be edited.
2) Look for these lines within the remmount.conf file. If they are there,
then the MAE Volume Manager extensions have been installed:
ident macfs ident_macfs.so floppy
action floppy action_macfs.so
In addition, software products that do not currently support the Solaris Volume Manager will conflict with MAE, which does use the Volume Manager. Until software products that are incompatible with the Volume Manager are upgraded to support it, you can work around this conflict by turning the Volume Manager on when using floppies or CDs in MAE and off when using other software. This work-around is only necessary when accessing a Macintosh floppy or CD since MAE doesn't use the Volume Manager until you try to access a Macintosh disk.
Also be aware that some software disables Volume Manager control at the device level by changing your /etc/vold.conf file, rather than starting or stopping the Volume Manager's vold process.
NOTE: If you are using Solaris 2.4, be sure you have applied the most current version of the Volume Manager patch -- as of January 1996, this version is 101907-05. To determine if this patch is installed, perform the following command:
showrev -p
If 101907-XX is not listed, you need to contact your support channel for this patch.
Article Change History:
30 Jan 1996 - Updated with the NOTE section on Solaris 2.4.
11 Oct 1994 - Corrected error.
28 Sep 1994 - Added more information.
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