How to read a Mac or PC formatted MO-disks with a USB drive and Linux?
What's an MO disk, anyway? Well, I had never heard of it before I moved to Japan, but here they use it quite frequently to transfer files so I had to learn how to deal with it... They look like ZIP disks but are a little bit bigger (640 Mo in my case). I'd rather use CD's but it is not possible at the moment. So here we, go, how the hell do you read the bloody disk...
To start with, you need an MO disk reader. Here we have a USB one from Logitech and that makes things a little bit easier...
Where it gets tricky, is that we have both macs and PS's and obviously, macs do not like PC disks and reciprocally... Luckily, Linux is around and can read all of them. Here we go.
- All of what I will describe requires root access, so log in as root...
- Plug-in and power the reader, insert a disk
- In the file
/var/log/messages, you should see something like (typeless +G /var/log/messages) to look at it)hub.c: new USB device 00:1d.2-1, assigned address 2 kernel: scsi2 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices kernel: usb-uhci.c: interrupt, status 3, frame# 1897 kernel: Vendor: FUJITSU Model: MCL3064UA Rev: 0010 kernel: Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02 kernel: Attached scsi removable disk sdb at scsi2, channel 0, id 0, lun 0What is important here, is that it tells you it assigned the devicesdbfor it. This might be different on another computer. - Create a directory to mount the disk:
mkdir /mnt/modiskor something like it. - mount the thing, if it is a windows MO disk:
mount -v -t vfat /dev/sdb /mnt/modisk/if it is a mac MO diskmount -v -t hfs /dev/sdb /mnt/modisk/(replacesdbif it was different in the kernel message) - transfer your files
- un-mount the device:
umount /mnt/modisk/ - you're done.
09/2003
Edited et reformated 01/2006
Edited et reformated 01/2006