I got a great response to my question, appended to this message, with

most providing accurate solutions... though the most appropriate reply

was "read the FAQ" (oops).

The answers are:

1. Use "volcheck" with no arguments to get Solaris to recognize newly

inserted media in a floppy drive.

2. This is intentional, to prevent the OS from frequently running the

floppy drive's motor and damaging the hardware.

3. Access the raw device through the name /vol/dev/rdiskette0/no_name,

though the name no_name may change from disk to disk (?).

Thanks to the following for their replies:

ajs6143@eerpf001.ca.boeing.com ( Andy J. Stefancik 237-2164 )

Sean Ward <seanw@amgen.com>

Benjamin Cline <benji@hnt.com>

Stephen P Richardson <spr@myxa.com>

glenn.w.cantello@hydro.on.ca (Glenn W Cantello)

Richard Aures <richard.aures@erlangen.netsurf.de>

Kevin.Sheehan@uniq.com.au (Kevin Sheehan {Consulting Poster Child})

Glenn.Satchell@uniq.com.au (Glenn Satchell - Uniq Professional Services)

Robert.Gillespie@waii.com (Robert.Gillespie@waii.com)

"Staton, Chris" <Chris.Staton@baesema.co.uk>

Casper Dik <casper@holland.Sun.COM>

Kevin Wenzel <kwenzel@privateI.com>

Marc S. Gibian

Telos Consulting Services phone: (617) 377-6350

PRISM/TFS email:gibian@stars1.hanscom.af.mil

---------------------- original question --------------

We have been running Solaris 2.5 on SPARCstation 20s and 10s for about

six months. Each of these machines has an internal floppy drive, but

we have not used them until very recently. I have discovered that the

volume manager does not respond to the insertion of media into the

floppy drive as it does to media insertion into a CDROM. While the

CDROM will be mounted, under /cdrom/cdrom0 & /cdrom/<name>, within a

few seconds, the floppy will not get mounted until the volume manager

"gets a tap on the shoulder." Commands I have found that provide that

tap are:

volcheck /dev/diskette

and

fdformat -d

Is the need for this "tap on the shoulder" a bug? A volume manager

configuration error? Intentional? Something else entirely?

Also, is there a way to permit direct device access to floppies

without disabling volume management of the floppy drive? We probably

need to be able to perform direct binary stream operations on the

device, such as tar cvf /dev/diskette ., as well as mounted filesystem

access.