Removable Media Under OS/2 | General Removable Media Issues
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I no longer develop this legacy resource.
Note: All these drives except for CDs (supported on DVD drives) have virtually disappeared. USB hard drives have replaced them, but support for USB was spotty for OS/2.
There is considerable support built into eComStation for these devices. The information on this page will be primarily of interest to those still running OS/2 Warp 3 and 4.
At the time that OS/2 Warp 4 was still supported, there are several formats that were vying for the honour of being the replacement for the floppy disk as the standard rewritable standard. This list included the Iomega Zip and Jaz drives, the SuperDisk LS-120 and rewritable CDs to name just a few of them.
The ability to format removable media in HPFS and to create multiple partitions on such larger disks such as the Iomega Jaz cartridges is included beginning with Fixpak M6 for Warp 4 and Fixpak 26 for Warp 3 to include all the more recent fixpaks. If you don't want to install one of these fixpaks for any reason you will find some drivers at the sites below to do the job. Check the Fixpaks Page for more information on downloading and installing OS/2 fixpaks.
Running Multiple Operating Systems might help if you are having difficulties with removable media while using more than just OS/2 on one computer.
At one time I ran five OSs, although OS/2 was my main environment.
I found that I needed to make sure the Zip or Jaz cartridge for the specific operating system was in the drive to avoid problems. Before the ability to format the media with HPFS I found that Win9x was particularly bad at corrupting the EAs on my removable OS/2 files.
Note: Win9x will offer to format any media that it cannot read, so be doubly sure that you haven't left an OS/2 HPFS-formatted cartridge in the drive when you can't read it under Windows.
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russharvey.bc.ca/os2/remmedia.html
Updated: November 11, 2019