🚀 go-pugleaf

    We recently were thinking of solutions for large storage capabilities
for our Confocal Microscope system. We presntly have one Sun station with
a magneto-optical r/w drive on it where we store our data. The data is 
collected on a 486 over at the microscope and then FTP'd over to the
Sun's MO drive.
    When I was looking to get a new MO system I thought of getting one for
the PC instead and have them write the data directly to this drive at the 
486 station. 

    One problem we came across immediately is that even if the drives were
compatible (same disk size & conforming to ISO), the actual file system on 
the disk as saved by the driver software differs; on the Sun its a SunOS 
file system and on the DOS-based 486, it uses the FAT tables and such.
So data stored on a disk on the DOS system cannot be read by the MO drive
on the Sun and vice versa.

    I had the idea that I might stick a DOS emulator on the Sun and have
it read the disks in DOS format. BUT as far as I know the DOS emulator
I looked up (SoftPC for SunOS 4) does not have any drivers for r/w optical
drives and even if I did NFS-mount the drive (the other option given by
SoftPC) the actual file format is still SunOS and so the disks wouldn't
be readable by the DOS machine.

    As far as I know so far there are no compatibility measures on such
kinds of drives. Now there're phase change r/w optical drives but I still
haven't heard of any compatibility between systems either.

    If anyone has any suggestions, they would be very welcome.

Rawn Shah
Neurobionetmgr, ARLDN, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721
rawn@neurobio.arizona.edu