General Purpose Drive Variables

The following general purpose drive variables are available:

file

The name of the file or device holding the disk image. This is mandatory. The file name should be enclosed in quotes.

use_xdf

If this is set to a non-zero value, mtools also tries to access this disk as an XDF disk. XDF is a high capacity format used by OS/2. This is off by default. See section XDF for more details.

partition

Tells mtools to treat the drive as a partitioned device, and to use the given partition. Only primary partitions are accessible using this method, and they are numbered from 1 to 4. For logical partitions, use the more general offset variable. The partition variable is intended for removable media such as Syquests, ZIP drives, and magneto-optical disks. Although traditional DOS sees Syquests and magneto-optical disks as `giant floppy disks' which are unpartitioned, OS/2 and Windows NT treat them like hard disks, i.e. partioned devices. The partition flag is also useful DOSEMU hdimages. It is not recommended for hard disks for which direct access to partitions is available through mounting.

scsi

When set to 1, this option tells mtools to use raw SCSI I/O instead of the standard read/write calls to access the device. Currently, this is supported on HP/UX, Solaris and SunOs. This is needed because on some architectures, such as SunOs or Solaris, PC media can't be accessed using the read and write syscalls, because the OS expects them to contain a Sun specific "disk label". As raw Scsi access always uses the whole device, you need to specify the "partition" flag in addition On some architectures, such as Solaris, mtools needs root privileges to be able to use the scsi=1 option. Thus mtools should be installed set uid root on Solaris if you want to access Zip/Jaz drives. Mtools uses its root privileges to open the device, and to issue the actual SCSI I/O calls. Moreover, root privileges are only used for drives described in a system-wide configuration file such as `/usr/local/etc/mtools.conf', and not for those described in `~/.mtoolsrc' or `$MTOOLSRC'.

privileged

When set to 1, this instructs mtools to use its set-uid and set-gid privileges for opening the given drive. This option is only valid for drives described in the system-wide configuration files (such as `/usr/local/etc/mtools.conf', not `~/.mtoolsrc' or `$MTOOLSRC'). Obviously, this option is also a no op if mtools is not installed setuid or setgid. This option is implied by 'scsi=1', but again only for drives defined in system-wide configuration files. Privileged may also be set explicitely to 0, in order to tell mtools not to use its privileges for a given drive even if scsi=1 is set. Mtools only needs to be installed setuid if you use the privileged or scsi drive variables. If you do not use these options, mtools works perfectly well even when not installed setuid root.

nolock

Instruct mtools to not use locking on this drive. This is needed on systems with buggy locking semantics. However, enabling this makes operation less safe in cases where several users may access the same drive at the same time.

offset

Describes where in the file the MS-DOS filesystem starts. This is useful for logical partitions in DOSEMU hdimages, and for ATARI ram disks. By default, this is zero, meaning that the filesystem starts right at the beginning of the device or file.

fat_bits

The number of FAT bits. This may be 12 or 16. This is very rarely needed, as it can almost always be deduced from information in the boot sector. On the contrary, describing the number of fat bits may actually be harmful if you get it wrong. You should only use it if mtools gets the autodetected number of fat bits wrong, or if you want to mformat a disk with a weird number of fat bits.

precmd

On some variants of Solaris, it is necessary to call 'volcheck -v' before opening a floppy device, in order for the system to notice that there is indeed a disk in the drive. precmd="volcheck -v" in the drive clause establishes the desired behavior.

Only the file variable is mandatory. The other parameters may be left out. In that case a default value or an autodetected value is used.

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