Using Zip drives on Athena
As of Athena 9.2, Zip drives are being phased out. While support for
existing Zip drives will continue for the short term, broken zip
drives will not be replaced. For storage of large files, we recommend
using recordable compact discs. For more information, see our stock
answer "Making CD-R and CD-RW discs on Athena" in the "Workstations"
category.
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Some of the machines (Sun and Linux) in the clusters should now
have Zip drives attached. The web page
http://web.mit.edu/olh/Clusters/
lists the locations of Zip drives.
Zip drives are be found in two sizes: 250 Mb drives, and 100 Mb
drives. All the Zip drives in the cluster are 250 Mb, but in case
you have a personal 100M zip drive:
100M drives will only read 100M disks; 250M drives will read both
250M disks and 100M disks, but are substantially slower for 100M
disks. Evidence suggests that copying large files in particular is
very slow for a 100M disk in a 250M zip drive, so if you to back up
a large file in this way, we recommend compressing it as much as
possible first using a program like zip (in sipb; zip is compatible
with pkzip/winzip) or gzip (in gnu).
On Sun and Linux machines, you will need to use the mtools commands:
athena% add -f mtools
athena% mdir z:
On Linux, you may first have to become root and load the usb kernel
modules into memory by doing the following:
First, get the root password of the machine. If you are on a cluster
workstation, you can do this by typing tellme root at the athena
prompt. Otherwise, you will have to get it from the administrator of
the machine. Then:
athena% su
Password: type root password here
bash-2.04# insmod usbcore
bash-2.04# insmod usb-uhci
bash-2.04# exit
You can also use some of the other mtools programs. For more
information on using mtools, refer to the stock answer:
25* WORKSTATIONS Answers
10 Using disks with DOS format
Zip disks seem to come pre-partitioned in 3 ways:
Drive z: is for a zip disk with 4 partitions. If using z: does
not work for you, you might want to try x: for a disk with one partition
or y: for a disk with no partitions.
Another useful command is the mzip command (Suns only at
present). It has the following options:
e Ejects the disk.
f Force eject even if the disk is mounted.
r Write protect the disk.
w Remove write protection.
p Password write protect.
x Password protect
q Queries the status
So
athena% mzip -e z:
should eject the zip disk. On Linux, just press the button on the
front of the zip drive, and it should eject. Otherwise, you can type
eject sda.
Last Updated: $Date: 2007/02/21 21:57:13 $
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