On Tue, 26 Sep 2006, Mike Pleasance wrote:
I'm currently stumped with the problem of mounting a fixed disk with a single
FAT32 partition (created by vxWorks) using Solaris 8 for Sparc.
We have been in contact with Sun and were simply told that, "Creating
and mounting a pcfs on a sparc-based fixed disk is not supported." In
fact, as I understand it, nothing (except formatting) can be done with a
fixed disk that does not have a solaris label present. This causes a
problem because both vxWorks and Windows expect the Fat32 MBR to reside
at sector 0.
Could you please privately contact me about this ? If that's verbatim what
you've been told, then no that's not correct, there is mount_pcfs(1m),
mkfs_pcfs(1m) and others, and have been in Solaris "ever" (yes, before
SunOS 5). You can use and/or create FAT filesystems on Solaris.
Btw, terminology nitpicking:
There's no such thing as a FAT32 MBR. There's an MBR, and there's a FAT32
BPB. They're not the same. If a FAT BPB resides at sector 0 then the disk
is unpartitioned. Otherwise, the MBR resides at sector 0, and the FAT BPB
at whatever the start sector of the corresponding partition (as per
entries in the MBR) is ...
Using PCFS:
On SPARC, you'd try "mount -F pcfs /dev/dsk/cXtYdZs2:[drive_letter] /mnt"
(for example - see manpage to mount_pcfs for more) to mount a FAT
filesystem. If the disk is already partitioned with a PC-style partition
table, then "mkfs -F pcfs -o fat=32 /dev/dsk/cXtYdZs2:[drive_letter]"
would create a FAT32 filesystem on the given PC partition for you, even on
SPARC.
Again, "has ever been like this". There are bugs (lots of) in PCFS and its
utilities on Solaris 8 that might result in you not being able to access
"good" FAT filesystems though you should be able to, we've fixed a huge
amount of these for OpenSolaris. If you fail on Solaris 8, it might well
make sense to try Solaris Express, one of the OpenSolaris Distributions,
or a self-built BFU from recent OpenSolaris sources.
The only problem that you can encounter on SPARC are "clean" disks, i.e.
that don't have a PC partition table. There is no utility on SPARC to
create one (fdisk(1m) is Solaris/x86 only). And PCFS and its utilities
rely on the presence of a PC-style partition table (you can create a
filesystem on an unpartitionied disk but might not be able to mount that
on a Windows machine then ...). But as you say above that the disk _is_
partitioned, that cannot be the issue.
Does anyone have any tricks on how to accomplish this, or is it simply
impossible like we have already been told?
What about modifying the sd/ssd driver using opensolaris code? Would it be
possible for us to build a new driver that we could run on Solaris 8 that allow
a disk without the solaris label to be mounted?
No need. Should be possible without. That said, you're interested in
working on sd and/or partitioning support issues ? Please give us your
input - there's work going on in this area, started with the cmlb (common
labeling) layered driver that went into OpenSolaris a few months ago, and
yes the underlaying idea why cmlb was created is to eventually abstract
"label" (PC partitioning, EFI, GPT, Solaris VTOC, ... ?) support from the
target driver(s) into cmlb.
Any thoughts or insight would be greatly appreciated!
As said, can you please send me direct mail ? Thanks !
FrankH.
Thanks,
Mike Pleasance
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