Tape dumping programs for Unix/Linux...

From: Raymond Moyers <rmoyers_at_nop.org>
Date: Thu May 2 14:08:41 2002

On Thursday 02 May 2002 13:05, you wrote:
> On 2002.05.02 18:25 Raymond Moyers wrote:
> > Whats wrong with cat ?
> [...]
> > I see most are using dd when cat is all they need
> cat(1) and dd(1) do not read / recognize the _physical_ block size of
> the tape.

 At the portion of the work where you just want to get the stuff
 spooled to a file, you dont care about "block size" yet, you
 just need to get it pulled off.

 Unix will treat any device as a stream of bytes

 On my old sony, mkboot is broken, you cant use the OS to
 create a bootable volume of itself

 so ... you hang the old scsi disk off your linux box and
 cat /dev/sdb > /files/sonyhdimage.img

 hang the new scsi disk off your linux box

 cat files/sonyhdimage.img > /dev/sdb

 Put new disk in sony, look mom it boots !!

 Now you redo the disklabel and shove everything
 except root up to a new volume above the footprint of the old disk
 redo the middle volumes to suit ... move the stuff back down
 mount the new space as /usr/local whatever

 Now you have a 1g bootable disk in a machine that cannot create
 one for itself...

 Do you see what im getting at here ? hello ?

 and guess what ... i never even bother to involve myself with
 any "block sizes" even as the multiple volumes on
 that image uses a mix of logical block sizes.

 I was pointing out a tool used as a simple bit stuffer
 and it was my intention to point out some things that might
 not be clear, if they was not familiar with the raw
 behavior of what they was doing.

 Raymond

 
Received on Thu May 02 2002 - 14:08:41 BST