Re: Mounting a floppy drive on a 9000/700 series

Stewart Smith <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
We have a 745i workstation with a SCSI floppy drive and for the life of
me I can't figure out how to mount it. The drive appears in ioscan and
in SAM and I've used mediainit and SAM to initialize discs. However,
the drive listing in SAM has the drive listed as "Unused" regardless of
trying to add the drive (without LVM). Similarly when I try to mount
the disk using the shell I get an error saying that the block device
file shows it as being an unknown file system. There are character and
block device files in /dev/floppy/ and /dev/rfloppy, but should there be
files in /dev/dsk etc. as well? There is no entry in fstab for the
drive, do I need to create one?

The driver being used in the kernel is "sflop" and it may be part of the
software loaded to run some Agilent/HP test equipment rather than being
a base part of HP-UX. Anyway I'm stuck, I want to use it mainly to
transfer data and programs from an old HP-BASIC v5 system, I think that
uses LIF formatted discs. If anyone has any experience of this, in
particular in getting the drive mounted for use with HP BASIC/UX 8 then
I'd be very grateful for a few hints.

"LIF" is the keyword here. I.e. the filesystem for exchange with the
"old HP-BASIC v5 system" is LIF.

HP-UX mountable filesystems are HFS and JFS/vxfs (and CDFS, etc. for
CDs).

LIF is not *mountable* on HP-UX, but it is *usable* on HP-UX. See the
LIF commands like lifcp(1), lifls(1), lifinit(1), etc.. The main
manpage is lif(4).

mediainit(1M) did a *Low* Level Format (LLF), so there is *no*
filesystem on the diskette (anymore). You can *High* Level Format (HLF)
it, i.e. put an empty LIF filesystem on it, with lifinit(1), but it's
easier to do that on the "old HP-BASIC v5 system". Also put some files
on it and then use lifls(1) on HP-UX to list the directory contents,
something like:

lifls -l /dev/rfloppy/...

Note that the device file should be the *character* device file which
points to the diskette drive.

Once this works, you can use lifcp(1), lifrm(1), etc..

I hope this helps.
.

Relevant Pages

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