3.5.6 General Purpose Drive Flags

A flag can either be set to 1 (enabled) or 0 (disabled). If the value is omitted, it is enabled. For example, scsi is equivalent to scsi=1

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.

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 system calls, 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 option. Thus mtools should be installed setuid root on Solaris if you want to access Zip/Jaz drives. Thus, if the scsi flag is given, privileged is automatically implied, unless explicitly disabled by privileged=0

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 /etc/mtools.conf, and not for those described in ~/.mtoolsrc or $MTOOLSRC.

privileged

When set to 1, this instructs mtools to use its setuid and setgid privileges for opening the given drive. This option is only valid for drives described in the system-wide configuration files (such as /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 explicitly 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.

vold

Instructs mtools to interpret the device name as a vold identifier rather than as a filename. The vold identifier is translated into a real filename using the media_findname() and media_oldaliases() functions of the volmgt library. This flag is only available if you configured mtools with the --enable-new-vold option before compilation.

swap

Consider the media as a word-swapped Atari disk.

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 XDF, for more details.

mformat_only

Tells mtools to use the geometry for this drive only for mformatting and not for filtering.

filter

Tells mtools to use the geometry for this drive both for mformatting and filtering.

remote

Tells mtools to connect to floppyd (see floppyd).