[alt.sources.d] Mtools for my Sparcstation

lever@vala.hw.stratus.com (Mark Lever) (12/05/90)

I am looking for something that will allow my sparcstation 3.5" drive to
read and write mac and PC diskettes.  Someone told me that MTOOLS could
do this.  Is this true and where can I find it?

Thanks,

Mark
(lever@vala.hw.stratus.com)

philr@knecht.Eng.Sun.COM (Phil Robar) (12/06/90)

lever@vala.hw.stratus.com (Mark Lever) writes:

>I am looking for something that will allow my sparcstation 3.5" drive to
>read and write mac and PC diskettes.  Someone told me that MTOOLS could
>do this.  Is this true and where can I find it?

mtools supports DOS, not Mac disks.  SunOS 4.1.1 has this feature
builtin.

DESCRIPTION
     PCFS is a filesystem type that allows users direct access to
     files  on  MS-DOS  formatted  disks  from  within  the SunOS
     operating system.  Once mounted, a PCFS filesystem  provides
     standard  SunOS  file  operations  and  semantics.  That is, users
     can create, delete, read, write  files  on  an  MS-DOS formatted
     disk.  They can also create/delete directories and list files in a
     directory.

     PCFS filesystems are mounted either with the command:

	  mount -t pcfs  device-special directory-name

     or

	  mount /pcfs

     if the following line

	  /dev/fd0  /pcfs     pcfs rw,noauto 0 0

     is in your /etc/fstab.

     File and directories created through  PCFS  have  to  comply with
     the  MS-DOS file name convention, which is of the form
     filename[.ext], where filename consists of one through eight
     upper-case  characters,  while  the optional ext consists of one
     through three upper-case characters.  PCFS converts  all the
     lower-case characters in a file name to upper-case, and chops off
     any extra characters in  filename  or  ext.   When displaying file
     names, PCFS only shows them in lower-case.

     One can use either the MS-DOS FORMAT command, or

	  fdformat -d

     command in the SunOS system to format a diskette  in  MS-DOS
     format.
--
Philip Robar
Sun Microsystems
Phone:	(415) 336-1423
philr@eng.sun.com	sun!knecht.eng!philr

jmm@eci386.uucp (John Macdonald) (12/11/90)

In article <4007@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> philr@knecht.Eng.Sun.COM (Phil Robar) writes:
|lever@vala.hw.stratus.com (Mark Lever) writes:
|
|>I am looking for something that will allow my sparcstation 3.5" drive to
|>read and write mac and PC diskettes.  Someone told me that MTOOLS could
|>do this.  Is this true and where can I find it?
|
|mtools supports DOS, not Mac disks.  SunOS 4.1.1 has this feature
|builtin.

Supporting Mac format has not been done often in the past.  For
the smaller formats (400K SS, 800K DS) the Mac uses variable speed
motor control to allow varying the number of sectors per track.
That is why PC's get 360K and 720K on the same disks.  Without
special hardware, this cannot be supported.

The newer high density drives from Apple use the same fixed
velocity layout as PC's, so you may see Mac layout support from
mtools or a similar program in the future (but they still won't
support the SS/DS formats).
-- 
Cure the common code...                      | John Macdonald
...Ban Basic      - Christine Linge          |   jmm@eci386