Why can't I access CDs or floppies?

Solaris 2.2 introduced a new scheme for automatically mounting
removable media. It consists of a program "vold" (volume daemon) which
sits around watching for insertions of floppies and CD's,
handles ejects, talks to the file manager, and invokes a second
program called "rmmount" (removable media mounter) to mount the disk.

Note that on most SPARCstations, you must run "volcheck" whenever
you insert a floppy, as the floppy hardware doesn't tell SunOS that
a floppy was inserted and polling the drive would wear it out
pretty quickly.

Advantages of this scheme:



- no longer need root; users can mount and unmount at will.


- can do neat tricks like automagically start "workman" or


  other Audio CD player when audio CD inserted.


- extensible - developers can write their own actions.

Drawbacks:



- can no longer access /dev/rfd0 to get at floppy; must use


  longer name like /vol/dev/rdsk/floppy0


- similarly, CD's get mounted on /cdrom/VOLNAME/SLICE, e.g.,


  /cdrom/solaris_2_2/s0 is slice 0 of the Solaris 2 CD


  (nice that it does mount all the partitions, though!).

To read or write a non-filesystem floppy (tar, cpio, etc),
put in the diskette and run "volcheck" from the commandline or
click "Check for Floppy" in the filemgr to get it noticed; then access
/vol/dev/rfd0/unlabeled (e.g. "tar tvf /vol/dev/rfd0/unlabeled").

[Solaris 2.3 and later: /vol/dev/rdiskette0/unlabeled, or
/vol/dev/aliases/floppy0.]

If you want the old behavior, remove the /etc/rc2.d/S*volmgt
link, and reboot.

ASGAUR