Features and Benefits

The Solaris environment gives users and software developers a standard interface for dealing with diskettes and CDs. Referred to as Volume Management, this interface provides three major benefits:

• By automatically mounting diskettes and CDs, it simplifies their use. (For a comparison between manual and automatic mounting, see Figure 11-1 on page 190.)
• It enables you to access diskettes and CDs without having to act as root.
• It allows you to give other systems on the network automatic access to any diskettes and CDs you insert into your system (see Chapter 13, "Using CDs From the Command Line" and Chapter 14, "Formatting and Using Diskettes From the Command Line").

Comparison of Automatic and Manual Mounting

Figure 11-1 compares the steps involved in manual mounting (without Volume Management) and automatic mounting (with Volume Management).

Figure 11-1

What You Can Do With Diskettes and CDs

Essentially Volume Management enables you to access diskettes and CDs just as manual mounting does, but more easily and without the need for root access. To make diskettes and CDs easier to work with, they are mounted in easy-to-remember locations. As a result, ...

If your system has more than one diskette or CD-ROM drive, see Table 11-1 for their access points.

Table 11-1

Media Device	Access File Systems On	Access Raw Data On
First diskette drive	/floppy/floppy0	/vol/dev/aliases/floppy0
Second diskette drive	/floppy/floppy1	/vol/dev/aliases/floppy1
First CD-ROM drive	/cdrom/cdrom0	/vol/dev/aliases/cdrom0
Second CD-ROM drive	/cdrom/cdrom1	/vol/dev/aliases/cdrom1

You can perform most diskette- and CD-related tasks knowing only the above information. However, step-by-step instructions for a variety of tasks are provided in subsequent chapters. A summary of those tasks, including which can be performed with File Manager and which must be performed from the command line, is provided in Figure 11-2 on page 192.

Figure 11-2 What You Can Do With CDs and Diskettes