From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri Aug 16 06:26:22 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id GAA01295 for hackers-outgoing; Fri, 16 Aug 1996 06:26:22 -0700 (PDT) Received: from seagull.rtd.com (root@seagull.rtd.com [198.102.68.2]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id GAA01290 for ; Fri, 16 Aug 1996 06:26:20 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from dgy@localhost) by seagull.rtd.com (8.7.5/8.7.3) id GAA08422; Fri, 16 Aug 1996 06:26:13 -0700 (MST) From: Don Yuniskis Message-Id: <199608161326.GAA08422@seagull.rtd.com> Subject: Re: File System on a tape To: louie@TransSys.COM (Louis A. Mamakos) Date: Fri, 16 Aug 1996 06:26:13 -0700 (MST) Cc: pechter@shell.monmouth.com, FreeBSD-hackers@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <199608161241.IAA04574@whizzo.transsys.com> from "Louis A. Mamakos" at Aug 16, 96 08:41:17 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > We could sure use something like this. Some kind of program would be needed > > to boot the tape, though. A modified FreeBSD program loader that would load > > from tape... Could something like this be done under dos for recovery and > > installation? > > While it's an interesting novelty, how is this better than > booting/loading something off a floppy? Pretty much everyone will Surely you jest? Have you ever tried to *load* FBSD off of floppies? With a file system on tape, you can boot and then just mount the tape and 'cp /tape/what/ever/you/want /wherever/you/want/it'. With floppies, you'd have to have explicitly prepared individual little filesystems to be able to recover anything at whill. Or, play with all the little furrballs, etc. > have a floppy on their system (or perhaps a CDROM drive), but how many > have a tape drive? I suspect anyone who take this stuff halfway serious has *some* form of tape -- even a little cartridge tape! > I think that a floppy disk bootstrap for a "full-feature" read-only > CDROM filesystem would be considerably more useful. I thought we already have that? And, it doesn't help you with anything *else* you've added to the file hierarchy -- e.g., ports! > Though not quite as good a hack, I'll grant you. My mt driver should be able to do this -- it was one of the criteria I used when writing it (and Joerg and I had a few chuckles over the silliness of it!) but I haven't gotten off my butt and ported it to 2.1R (from 1.1.5.1R). Also, I doubt it would help anyone *else* (since every query I posted to the list failed to produce any other folks with similar devices) :> I'm curious as to whether or not my DLT would work in a block mode. Or, is the limitation solely in the st device??? --don