Removable drives

Linux Hardware Compatibility HOWTO
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# 20. Removable drives

All SCSI drives should work if the controller is supported, including optical (MO), WORM, floptical, Bernoulli, Zip, Jaz, SyQuest, PD, and others.

- Panasonic MO (combines a CD-ROM drive and an optical removable disk). You have to set a switch when configuring the kernel to get both part work at the same time.

- Parallel port Zip drives here

- Parallel port Avatar Shark-250 here

Removable drives work like hard disks and floppies, just `fdisk` / `mkfs` and mount the disks. Linux provides drive locking if your drives support it. `mtools` can also be used if the disks are in MS-DOS format.

CD-R drives require special software to work. Read the CD-R Mini-HOWTO.

Linux supports both 512 and 1024 bytes/sector disks. Starting with kernel 2.1.32 Linux also supports 2048 bytes/sector. A patch to kernel 2.0.30 is available at here.

The 2048 bytes/sector support is needed for

- Fujitsu magneto-optical disk drives M2513

Starting with pre-patch-2.0.31-3 IDE/ATAPI internal Zip drives, flopticals and PD's are supported.

- LS-120 floptical

- PD-CD

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