Linux - Panasonic LF1000 Optical Disk mini HOWTO ************************************************ version 1.1 - March 29, 1996 ============================= This file applies to PC based systems only. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Disclaimers ============ Neither the author nor the distributors of this HOWTO are in any way responsible for physical, financial, or moral damage incurred by following the suggestions in this text. Copyright ========== The Linux Panasonic LF1000 Optical Disk mini HOWTO is copyrighted (C) 1996 by Skip Rye. Linux HOWTO documents may be reproduced and distributed in whole or in part, in any medium physical or electronic, as long as this copyright notice is retained on all copies. Commercial redistribution is allowed and encouraged. The author, however, would like to be notified of any such distributions. All translations, derivative works, or aggregate works incorporating any Linux HOWTO documents must be covered under this copyright notice. In other words, you may not produce a derivative work from a HOWTO and impose additional restrictions on its distribution. Exceptions to these rules may be granted under certain conditions. In short, we wish to promote dissemination of this information through as many channels as possible. However, we do wish to retain copyright on the HOWTO documents, and would like to be notified of any plans to redistribute the HOWTOs. Should you have any questions, please contact Greg Hankins, the Linux HOWTO coordinator, at gregh@sunsite.unc.edu. You may finger his address for phone number and additional contact information. Phase Change Optical Technology ================================ Optical Phase Change technology is used to create "In Phase" or "Out of Phase" bits on a special media for phase change writing. The drive uses a LASER of different power levels or LASER intensities to produce this effect. One power level allows the media to flow into a crystalline form while the other creates an "Out of Phase" condition. The crystallized areas reflect the read Lasers beam with a different coefficient of reflectivity than the non-crystallized areas. Thus, data can be read from the disk. What makes the phase change optical disk special is that it the disk is formated with concentric cylinders or tracks with each track being sectored much like a magnetic disk or read/write optical disk. The tracks are very close so a lot of data can be stored on a disk. This is different from a CD-ROM in that it gives your system the look and feel of a magnetic disk. CD-ROMs have a spiraling track much like a audio record. Having tracks and sectors alone would not make the phase change drive special from optical disk but the drive has some very special properties; The phase change drive allows for direct overwrite of data which magneto optical can't do inexpensively and the media has the very special property of NOT being susceptible to magnetic fields or as sensitive to static discharge which gives the media a very long shelf life. POINTS OF INTEREST =================== o Less than $500. o If You already have a SCSI controller they may provide you with and extra disk instead. o Read/Write optical disk. o Can read CD-ROMs at 4X speed. o Can read Kodak PhotoCDs. o Media has a 15 Year shelf life. o SCSI-2 Interface. o Track/sector format as opposed to CD-ROMs spiraling record format. o 165ms access time - much better than a tape file restore. o 650Mb data storage per diskette. o Diskettes are about $50 each. THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ======================= o It is unknown if the SCSI controller sold with the drive will work for Linux. If you find that it or other controllers work, please E-Mail me! o Optical disk format not compatible with any other disk drive. However, it does have a fair chance of being the next A drive for PCs. o Vendors don't seem to support UNIX very well, to bad $$$ - marketing is targeted for DOS/Windows and Macintosh. o It seems that the "Use LU" jumper setting works for both Linux and DOS even though the manual for DOS says to not use LUs? So you don't have to change jumper settings between DOS/Windows and Linux. Installation ============= The LF1000 is SCSI-2 compatible device. It features a block size of 512 bytes and is compatible with the Linux SCSI drivers. This drive was installed on a PC compatible AMD 100MHZ 486 with an Adaptic 1542C SCSI bus-master controller. To install and mount a read/write optical disk the following steps were taken; Installation steps : o Install the drive and set the SCSI address to not interfere with other SCSI devices. Reconnect all cabling. o Boot the computer. Your SCSI controller should note the new drive. o During the Linux kernel boot, you should see an additional SCSI device. In my case, having a magnetic system disk for device /dev/sda it shows up as /dev/sdb. o I did NOT partition the device because fdisk issued an overwrite warning and I did not want to change anything from a dosemu standpoint. o mkfs -t ext2 /dev/sdb o mkdir /pd o mount -t ext2 -o ro,suid,dev,exec,auto,nouser,async /dev/sdb /pd - Read only o mount -t ext2 -o defaults /dev/sdb /pd - Mount drive W/R Your ready to "Rock'n'Roll" Usage hints ============ Currently it is unknown if the SCSI kernel driver will support switch-able device modes - ie. CD-ROM ISO 9660 format and ext2 file-systems. If someone knows please E-mail me. When Linux boots, it should recognize your new SCSI drive? ie sda or sdb device. Here is a cutout of the demsg command. Notice it detected the MATSHITA drive. You should get a similar message. Note : The three lines below "Adding Swap" line was because Linux was booted for pd use. If a CD-ROM was in the drive at boot time the driver would have mounted it as /cdrom using ISO 9660 format. YOU MUST BOOT LINUX WITH A CD-ROM INSTALLED TO USE THE DRIVE AS A CD-ROM. Once Linux is booted with a CD-ROM it is simple a matter of doing a "umount /cdrom" to change media. The new CD-ROM would of course have to be re-mounted. A shell is provided below to assist you with this, just cut it out to a file say "mgrpd" and do "sh mgrpd" #------------------------ Cut of demsg command ------------------------------- Configuring Adaptec at IO:330, IRQ 11, DMA priority 5 scsi0 : Adaptec 1542 scsi : 1 host. Vendor: QUANTUM Model: PD1050iS Rev: 3110 Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02 Detected scsi disk sda at scsi0, id 0, lun 0 Vendor: MATSHITA Model: PD-1 LF-1000 Rev: A109 Type: Optical Device ANSI SCSI revision: 02 Detected scsi disk sdb at scsi0, id 1, lun 0 scsi : detected 2 SCSI disks total. SCSI Hardware sector size is 512 bytes on device sda SCSI Hardware sector size is 512 bytes on device sdb Linux version 1.2.13 (root@bigkitty) (gcc version 2.7.0) #1 Wed Aug 23 03:54:14 CDT 1995 Partition check: sda: sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4 sdb: bad partition table VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) read-only. Adding Swap: 34812k swap-space end_request: I/O error, dev 2100, sector 64 isofs_read_super: bread failed, dev 0x2100 iso_blknum 16 Unable to identify CD-ROM format. ------------------------ Cut of demsg command ------------------------------- I've got an Adaptec 1452C SCSI controller with Slackware's "scsinet1" kernel . It works fine with that configuration. Note, if your controller is different check the SCSI-HOWTO by Drew Eckhardt for comments. To aid in using the LF1000 drive here is a shell. You are free to use the shell but please keep the copyright with it. --------------------------------- Cut Here --------------------------------- #@/@/@ mgrpd ABR Linux 1.2.13 486 mgr shell for phase change drive #************************************************************************# # # # program : mgrpd # # # # # # # # # # Author : Skip Rye Copyright 1996 # # # # Revision : v1.0 02-01-96 Start # # 03-13-96 Released # # # # Calls : None # # # # Files : # # # # # ########################################################################*/ # Display menu and process choice: sel=0 while [ $sel ] do echo "***************************************************************" echo "* MGRPD *" echo "* Version v1.0, Copyright 1996, Author Skip Rye *" echo "***************************************************************" echo "************** ext2 formated file system *********************" echo "1) Format pd disk - mkfs /dev/sdb" echo "2) Mount pd read/write" echo "3) Mount pd read only" echo "************** dos formated file system ***********************" echo "Note : must have been formatted using dos" echo "4) Mount read/write" echo "5) Mount read only" echo "40) List disk space - df" echo "50) umount" echo "######################## CDROM ################################" echo "Note : must have Use LUN Numbers jumper on drive" echo "100) Mount CDROM" echo "101) umount CDROM" echo "END Hit to End" echo echo "Select option: \c" read sel case $sel in 1) echo "This option assumes ext2 is the default mkfs format" echo "This will DESTROY ALL data on disk. Enter y to continue." read ans1 if [ $ans1 ] then echo "Enter the fully qualified path name of the PD drive" echo "ie. /dev/sdb" read pdpath if [ $pdpath ] then if [ $ans1 = "y" -o $ans1 = "Y" ] then echo "This will DESTROY ALL data on disk $pdpath. Enter y to co ntinue" read ans2 if [ $ans2 ] then if [ $ans2 = "y" -o $ans2 = "Y" ] then mkfs $pdpath fi fi fi fi fi ;; 2) mount -t ext2 -o defaults /dev/sdb /pd ;; 3) mount -t ext2 -o ro,suid,dev,exec,auto,nouser,async /dev/sdb /pd ;; 4) mount -t msdos -o rw,suid,dev,exec,auto,nouser,async /dev/sdb /pd ;; 5) mount -t msdos -o ro,suid,dev,exec,auto,nouser,async /dev/sdb /pd ;; 40) df ;; 50) umount /dev/sdb ;; 100) /etc/rc.d/rc.cdrom ;; 101) umount /cdrom ;; esac done --------------------------------- Cut Here --------------------------------- If things don't work consider the following; o What kind of SCSI controller are you using? Is that controller supported, see the SCSI-HOWTO by Drew Eckhardt. o Is support for that controller complied in your Kernel? o For the CD to work you need to have powered on the LF1000 and installed a CD-ROM before you boot Linux. After that you can switch CD's by unmounting, switching CD-ROMs and remounting - See the "mgrpd" shell provided. o For the read/write optical disk to work you must have booted Linux without a CD-ROM installed in the drive. o Is the jumper setting for the LF1000 set to use logical unit (LU) numbers. The media which comes with the drive is reported be re-writable about 500,000 times. This means that it is not advisable to install a live operating system such as Linux on the phase change optical drive. These live operating systems tend to cache processes to and from disk. Over time this can easily approach the phase change media life. Mount drive read only as much as possible. When writing to the drive do so in large chunks. This will help reduce any file fragmentation which will require more read seeks. This is however an excellent media for backups, gifs, mpeg or storing large programs which you don't use that often. The restore from backup is much faster that tape. Backups can be performed using the cp -rp command without the need for the ftape driver. This however, will replace symbolic links with the actual file. Author : Skip Rye root@brspc_0064.msd.ray.com