How to make a tape 386 Unix boot diskette

Dennis S. Breckenridge root at nebulus.UUCP
Sat Feb 10 08:09:54 AEST 1990


Oh well, it was inevitable that the question would be asked. 
Probably the easiest way of putting the packages on tape would
be to copy them on, an archive at a time. For instance if
the first package was face (2 disks) cpio BOTH disks into
a /usr/tmp directory then type:

# find . -print | cpio -ocvC32768 > /dev/rmt/c0s0n

Notice the "c0s0n" NO REWIND device. Blow away the /usr/tmp/* stuff 
and repeat until done! Play with a shell script that will install
it in this format. AT&T 3B2 Sysadm will give you some clues on this
type of media. Thier BOOTABLE tape has a boot image, a directory of
whats on the rest of the tape in a magic format (look at sysadm tapepackage
stuff its pretty wild), then each archive on the no-rewind device.

This is not what I have done, it's just a suggestion. 

I set my system up the way I like it, all drivers installed
accounts set up, etc... then:

# cd /
# find . -print | cpio -ocvC32768 > /dev/rmt/c0s0

This way all I have to do is boot disk #1 and cpio 
all the goodies back into the system. 

Don't forget to do an idbuild when the system restores.
"/etc/conf/bin/idbuild"

BTW: -C32768 almost keeps my tape drive streaming, but its much 
faster than the default of 512 bytes. 
-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
NAME:     Dennis S. Breckenridge                 UUCP: dennis at nebulus
               EMACS: Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------



More information about the Comp.sys.att mailing list