[pups] Making a TK50 2.11BSD boot tape for an 11/73

David Evans dfevans at bbcr.uwaterloo.ca
Fri Jan 17 03:33:54 AEST 2003


On Thu, Jan 16, 2003 at 06:28:30PM +0100, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> >   Ahhh--of course.  One would have to do a series of "dd"s in order to
> > get the padding happening.
> 
> Probably not. Repeated "dd"s will not produce the same result. This is the
> typical error when not understanding that tapes actually are not a stream
> of characters. (And also a good example when the Unix paradigm fails 
> pretty bad).

  If you could do something like

(dd if=mtboot sync bs=512 |+ dd if=mtboot sync bs=512 |+ dd if=boot sync bs=512) | dd of=/dev/whatever obs=512

in order to concatenate the multiple copies of mtboot then all would be well.

> >   That's not a bad idea.  Perhaps I should just make a minimal bootable image
> > using simh or such, dd it to a SCSI disk, and then attach that to my 11/73.
> > Might be easier than endless futzing with the TK50.
> 
> Don't. The moment you copy a tape file to disk, you will loose meta
> information unless you use a program specifically designed to preserve
> that information.
> 

  I meant an actual bootable system, not the tape image.

-- 
David Evans          (NeXTMail/MIME OK)             dfevans at bbcr.uwaterloo.ca
Ph.D. Candidate, Computer/Synth Junkie     http://bbcr.uwaterloo.ca/~dfevans/
University of Waterloo         "Default is the value selected by the composer
Ontario, Canada           overridden by your command." - Roland TR-707 Manual



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