USB pen drive support on Itanium

[Brian Reiter]

Hi folks,

I've just received an Itanium rz2660 (running OpenVMS 8-3) to complete the initial stages of a software migration.

I've had a quick look at USB support for pen-drives and have the following queries:

1) Is there a list of supported devices (pen drives in particular)?

2) Is there any software we can use to read and write FAT formatted pen drives (or conversely software on a PC which will read ODS formatted drives)?

cheers

Brian

[Karl Rohwedder]

Brian,

to work with MS-DOS formatted disks you can use the MTOOLS, which had been ported to VMS, see the freeware archives:
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/freeware/freeware50/mtools/

regards Kalle

[Ian Miller.]

You would need to contact HP to get statements of what is supported.

More recent MTOOLS can be found at
http://www.antinode.org/dec/sw/mtools.html

[Steven Schweda]

1) While the SPD is the authoritative source
(and the link from
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/info/spd/
seems to lead down memory lane), I believe
that the list of supported devices is quite
short, but that the list of working devices
is considerably longer. Also, the fellow in
charge of the USB software seems to be pretty
susceptible to complaints about non-working
devices, including unsupported ones.

At VMS V8.3 (on Alpha, so I assume also on
IA64), the USB infrastructure seems to be
pretty convenient to use.

2) I don't use it much, but I can usually get
the mtools found at antinode.org to do what
I want. (And complaints are always welcome.)

[Hoff]

There is PC software to read ODS disks and there is OpenVMS software to read FAT disks. mtools has been mentioned, and that's a fairly common choice.

The list of what open source tools I know of for FAT are in the OpenVMS FAQ. MadGoat PCX is one, WinFX is another. There's another one lurking in PATHWORKS (PCDISK), and there's at least one other undocumented on around as well. I'll add mtools to the next edition of the FAQ. The ODS readers are usually ODS*, and here are some readme files from the Freeware V8 distro.

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/freeware/freeware80/ods-2-reader-for-osf-1/freeware_readme.txt
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/freeware/freeware80/ods-2-reader/freeware_readme.txt
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/freeware/freeware80/ods2/freeware_readme.txt

[Brian Reiter]

Thanks for the help. I'd forgotten about the ODS2 stuff o the freeware disk.

Time to do some more experimenting with various pen drives.

cheers

Brian