How to make a tape 386 Unix boot diskette

[Bill Kennedy]

> Frank McGee in article <4469 at cuuxb.ATT.COM>
>>You can't boot from tape (ala 3b2 and non-PC systems) but you
>>can install Unix from tape.  Basically you boot a small kernel
>>from a floppy, then install everything from tape.

> Les Mikesell in article <1990Feb8.042826.8377 at chinet.chi.il.us>
[ weary of diskette handling on a re-install ... ]
>I'd like to see a way to copy all the add-on package floppies onto a
>tape so you could re-install en mass.  The install procedure could
>just copy each disk image off the tape before using it. 

Me too, and I'd like to see a way that we could use ISC (mounted file
systems) and AT&T (cpio archives with pre-determined files) used either
interchangeably or together.  I have AT&T 3.2.2, 3.1, ISC 2.0.2, 1.0.6
systems scattered about but all have Wangtex (Everex) 60Mb streamers.
I have made install tapes for IBM's AIX by just redirecting the backup
(a cpio'ish AIXism) to /dev/rmt0 and doing the restore (same thing, other
direction) from the same device.  They even have a way whereby you can
have the backup image on another machine and install over the network, but
that's not what I'm talking about.

It would seem that using the tape device that doesn't rewind after close
should do the trick.  In theory at least, you could actually have diskette
images in successive tape files and treat them as diskettes rather than
one big long string of files.  How you work around between mounted file
systems and cpio archives is a bit beyond my curiosity.

As an alternative, each (ISC & AT&T) approach has at least a list of
files for each installable package.  In AT&T's case it's a cpio archive
member called "Files" (I think) and in ISC's it's something else.  You
could go get each of those members and make a composite list of files
to archive to tape with cpio or tar and bring back the package that way.
It's clumsy, but not as clumsy as handling 20 or so diskettes.  I've not
been so unfortunate as to have had to re-install because of a failure but
I have changed hard drives a few times and it *is* a pain.
-- 
Bill Kennedy  usenet      {attctc,att,cs.utexas.edu,sun!daver}!ssbn!bill
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