Iomega JAZ DRIVES

Mike Andrew

Tested on SCSI and IIel ONLY, IDE has NOT been tried.

Jaz drives are scsi, even when connected to the parallel port. This means that apart from the interface driver (scsi card, or parallel port) all other drivers are common garden scsi.

For parallel port drivers go here

For scsi drivers it requires the driver for the scsi card. This requirement is common to all scsi devices and may already have been established if you have (say) a scsi HD, or cdrom. See the modprobe table at the beginning of this section for further information. Once the card driver is instantiated, the devices discovered on the card buss are assigned an sdX number. For Jaz (if it is the first device) it will be sda and all references to mounting it will be /dev/sda.

Alternatively, here is a truly excellent gui for handling Ioemag Jaz / zip that stands alone from the general file system.

The steps to install Jaz take about 10 minutes! The gui provided is just plain excellent. Persevere, it's worth the small effort. This driver is so good that it handles ZIP and JAZ in any flavour including Parallel

ZERO:

If you don't have forms designer, you aren't serious about your system. Xforms (forms designer) is _the_ premier gui X application widget set. It does all the hard work for programmers by supplying standardised buttons, drop down boxes and etc. Just about any serious app out there uses this library to present you with the details. If you haven't installed it on your system, don't complain, just do it, as nearly everything you use in X off the internet will rely on it (except KDE).

If necessary click here, for the Xforms StepByStep. You cannot install this Jaz driver (or much else) without Xforms.


ONE:

An excellent gui exists here

http://www.scripps.edu/~jsmith/jazip/

Simply download the tarball supplied and continue on with these steps.

TWO:

tar -zxvf whatever.tar.gz

Edit the make file and change the line to read

CFLAGS=-O -m486 -I/usr/X11R6/include

THREE:

Decide whether you want all users to use this gui, or only a user, if all users, su into root before continuing.

FOUR:

type

make
make_install

FIVE:

Make a mount directory as in (eg)

mkdir /mnt/jaz

SIX:

Edit /etc/jazip.conf

(this file was installed via step four above)


The line entry is very self explanatory, looking as it does just like /etc/fstab (and it's supposed to). Simply change (or add) the first line to read

/dev/sdX /mnt/jaz auto auto 0 0


X is the only tricky part, on a system with a single scsi controller it will be 'a'. You can examine the output of tail /var/log/messasges to discover where your scsi labels are, or simply use Coas to do same. All in all it is most likely to be /dev/sda. Try it.

NB: The partitioning of Zip and Jaz drives is proprietary to Ioemega and come factory formatted. The resulting mount device in a Linux ssytem becomes /dev/sdX4, simply because, of all the pre-existing partition styles on the drives, it is partition 4 that is the most convenient.

SEVEN:

In a console type the magic words

jazip &

This will automount the first entry found in /etc/jazip.conf. On my system, since I have JAZ, and a parallel zip, to use my zip with this driver

jazip /dev/sdb4




EIGHT

Enjoy