Transferring Distribution Tapes

[katz at rpal.com]

In article <8853 at brazos.Rice.edu> hook at geog.ubc.ca (Chris Hook) writes:
> 
> Has anyone successfully tranfered SunOS 4.1 distrubution tape material
> from the regular Sun 1/4" carttridge format to an 8mm Exabyte type format?
> I'd apreciate hearing what (if anything beyond the trivial) is involved,
> and if neccesary, I'll post a summary here.
> 


I have not done the transfer you mention, but I did once create 1/2" 3.5
tapes from 1/4" 3.5 tapes.  There are basically two problems which must be
overcome:

1) Sun places a proprietary header at the beginning of the tapes (as the
   first file) which is different for each type media.  I do not know whether
   SunInstall currently checks this file to verify it or just skips over it.

2) The second file is a directory of the files which appear on the given
   tape.  It is used by suninstall to decide when to tell the user to switch
   tapes.  This directory is just ascii so you can rebuild a new single
   directory from the directories of the various 1/4" tapes for the 8mm.

The other files on a distribution tape other than the header file, the
directories, and the various utilities like diag, miniunix, etc. are just
tar files.  If you are a bit of a hacker and are willing to install a
machine without using sun Install, you can just untar the various parts of
the OS by hand while running mimiunix.

Morry Katz
Rockwell Science Center
administrator at rpal.com (machine administration issues)
katz at rpal.com (other)