"Floppy tape"

[Jeffrey L Bromberger]

In article <72 at fbits.ttank.com> Mariusz at fbits.ttank.com (Mariusz Stanczak) writes:
>Having recently accuired a tape backup unit (thanks Vince),
>I have the following quiestions:
>
>	- has anyone created a standalone boot floppy with
>	  a configuration that would permit the use of the
>	  tape unit?  What would that entail if I were to
>	  create one?
Look on OSU - Lenny posted something like this, using the .o's for the
kernel and the tp driver, you made a bootable floppy.

>	- even with large blocking (256KB is the largest
>	  I could enter to `gtar') the unit does not seem
>	  to "stream" for long... it's runs more like a saw,
>	  forth and back.  Is that it's "beauty"?  This be-
>	  havior makes it VERY slow (though I appreciate 
>	  having the ability to "compress"-backup the whole
>	  44MB on one cart :-)).  Any work-arounds (`dbuf'
>	  does help some, but not enough)?
I was working on this for a while, but gave up in disgust.  There was
*no* documentation on the driver interface!  Even with a little help
from some friends, it was still pretty ugly.  There was no
*distributed* tp.h file, and the man page for qt(7) is positively not
what we have - there were no working QIC-02 boards for the general
public.

What probably has to be done is to make a diffent kind of dbuf (maybe
tbuf?) that stores huge data chunks.  If you can push enough
data at the tape, you can get about a 6.5 second stream, the most I
ever saw :-(  If anyone ever managed to get it to really stream, I'd
be delighted to hear how!!

j

-- 
Jeffrey L. Bromberger
System Operator---City College of New York---Science Computing Facility
jeffrey at sci.ccny.cuny.edu			jeffrey at ccnysci.BITNET
	Anywhere!{cmcl2,philabs,phri}!ccnysci!jeffrey