[TUHS] Determining what was on a tape back in the day

[Ronald Natalie]

You can’t mount a regular 9 track or many other types because they weren’t block replaceable.    Once you wrote the superblock the second time, you lost the rest of the filesystem.


> On Nov 19, 2017, at 5:00 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 19 Nov 2017, Ron Natalie wrote:
> 
>> You could actually mkfs a DECtape and mount it but the system would stall while rewinding to write the superblock. 
> 
> The early Sun boxes used to hang when rewinding the cartridge tape, because the controller didn't release the Multibus; the stingy Lionel Singer used to sell the 3/50 as cheap servers...
> 
> And you haven't lived until just for fun you put a file system onto a 9-track tape and ran FSCK on it.
> 
> -- 
> Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."