Date: Mon, 3 Nov 1997 23:22:50 -0800 (PST) From: Julian Elischer <julian@whistle.com> To: Simon Shapiro <Shimon@i-Connect.Net> Cc: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>, gopu@global.com, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de Subject: Re: Help in data recovery Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.95.971103231443.17567A-100000@current1.whistle.com> In-Reply-To: <XFMail.971103220738.Shimon@i-Connect.Net>
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On Mon, 3 Nov 1997, Simon Shapiro wrote: > > Hi Terry Lambert; On 04-Nov-97 you wrote: > > > Surely Julian didn't want you to run fdisk on a tape drive. :-) So > > > just type `fdisk', and it will pick up the first disk for you. I considered whether one would wan tot do that, but moderne filesystems are so dependent on having accurate rrandom placement, and the tape systems so divergent in how well they can position, that I decided not to try tempt the user. I therefore actually DELETED what support htere was in the system for mounting (in the FS sense) a block device that was actually a tape. If the possitionning gets better, it might be possible to add a possitionable block interface. Personally I have better things to do with my 5 minutes per week of free time. > > > > If the manufacturer didn't want me to put a filesystem on a device, > > then they'd make it so the device wasn't block addressable. Otherwise > > it gets an FS... > > > > mount -t ansitape /dev/rst0 /mnt been done, the perpertators should have been shot.. > > > > 8-) 8-) > > He is laughing and I am crying :-)) > > This was the standard mode of operation as recently as the Tahoe project. > But really was the only way to install Unix on a PDP11. You mount the tape > and watch in amazement as the hours go by. The amazement came from the > fact that it actually booted. smart people loaded a running system, with a ram disk, idled it, wrote the whole thing to tape, and prefixed it with a loader that knew how to read the image.. loading took 10 seconds and you had an up and running configured system.. time for PHK to jump in with the origins of the 'beer-ware licence' here. We used to do this under AMOS running on LSI-11 processors. (dammed if I can remember what we called it though) julian
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