21.4 Mounting a USB Disk as a Local FAT Volume or NSS Volume (NetWare)

NetWare 6.5 SP5 and later supports storage media attached via USB connection, such as USB flash drives, floppy drives, or hard drives. The USB drives are automatically recognized and mounted if the drive contains unpartitioned free space or is formatted with the FAT16, FAT32, or NSS file systems. Other file systems such as NTFS are not supported. Mount USB devices to drive letters above C:.

Any unpartitioned free space larger than 10 MB can be configured with NSS pools and volumes, just as for any local drive on NetWare. Use the standard NSS management tools, commands, and utilities to control NSS volumes on USB-attached media.

The SET parameter and command called Local FAT Volume Mount (lfvmount) controls whether automatic detection and mount is enabled (On, default) or disabled (Off) for local FAT volumes. Local FAT volumes are available to the server but are not seen by users. Use the commands in Table 21-1 to control the detection and mounting behavior for local FAT volumes on your NetWare server:

Table 21-1 Local FAT Volume Commands

Command

Description

 
set auto lfvmount=value

Determines whether automatic detection and mounting is enabled (default) or disabled for local FAT volumes.

If lfvmount is set to On (default), NetWare automatically detects and mounts local FAT volumes as you insert the media, and assigns them a drive letter.

If lfvmount is set to Off, you must enter the lfvmount command at a system console prompt to manually mount FAT volumes as needed.

This setting persists until the server is rebooted. Put the command in the startup.ncf file if you want it to persist through a server reboot.

You can also set this parameter using the MONITOR utility.

Value: On (default), Off

 
lfvmount

Mounts local FAT volumes. For example, you would re-enter this command each time you change a floppy disk in the USB floppy drive. 

lfvolumes

Displays a list of all local FAT volumes that are currently mounted and provides details about them.

 
help lfvmount

Displays syntax information for using the lfvmount command.