Peripherals under SGI

When installing a SCSI floppy, tape or CD-ROM drives on an SGI, the system automatically sets up the software and deposits an icon for the device on the desktop. So the appropriate device nodes should be created automatically. The system also assigns a name to the device. Tape drives are labeled dat or qic according to which format the drive is. CD-ROM drives are labeled cdrom. The first CD-ROM connected will have a mount point of /cdrom. The second will have a mount point of /cdrom2 and so on. Floppy drives are labeled floppy. The initial floppy drive is given a mount point of /floppy. Mount points for other floppy drives are numbered like the CD-ROM mount points.

When assigning SCSI addresses, 0 is reserved for the controller and 1 is reserved for the internal system disk. If there is a second system disk the ID number 2 is used for it. The hinv command can be used to find out from the controller which SCSI IDs are free.

The installation steps include:

Powering down the system including any peripheral devices.
Installing the new device.
Powering the system back up including all peripherals.

The processes for installing CD-ROM, tape and floppy drives manually are very similar. For floppy drives:

Install the hardware.
Log into the system as root, cd into /dev and enter:
./MAKEDEV floppy

This tells the MAKEDEV program to create the appropriate device nodes.

The steps involved in replacing one floppy drive with a different type of floppy drive are slightly different. In this case the MAKEDEV program needs to create the appropriate device nodes according to the SCSI controller and drive number of floppy drive.

Install the hardware.
Log in as root, cd into /dev/rdsk and enter:
rm fds*
./MAKEDEV floppy
To link the device node to a name that is easy to remember and convenient in terms of accessing the drive, create a symlink such as:
ln -s /dev/rdsk/fds0d3.48 /dev/floppy

When adding a tape drive to a system that does not already have one:

Install the hardware.
Log in as root, cd into /dev and enter:
./MAKEDEV tape

When replacing one tape drive with another:

Install the hardware.
Log in as root, cd into /dev and enter:
rm *tape
./MAKEDEV tape tapelinks

This tells MAKEDEV to create the appropriate device nodes and link that node to /dev/tape. It is best to consult the MAKEDEV man page before running MAKEDEV as certain combinations of tape drives and controllers require options other than tape. There may also be options available which are not documented on the man page. However, they will be listed in the MAKEDEV script which can be found in the /dev directory.