dd26+@andrew.cmu.edu (Douglas F. DeJulio) (12/17/90)
I've got a NeXTstation at home with a 3.5" floppy drive, and a VAXstation at the office with a 3.5" floppy drive. If I format a floppy with a unix filesystem using one of these machines, is there any way (short of writing a device driver) to read it on the other? I'm curious about compatibility with SPARCstation drives as well, but I'm not as concerned because I don't use those frequently. -- Doug DeJulio dd26@andrew.cmu.edu ddj@zardoz.club.cc.cmu.edu
slsw2@cc.usu.edu (12/19/90)
In article <AbPCdOm00VI8APgkFd@andrew.cmu.edu>, dd26+@andrew.cmu.edu (Douglas F. DeJulio) writes: > I've got a NeXTstation at home with a 3.5" floppy drive, and a > VAXstation at the office with a 3.5" floppy drive. If I format a > floppy with a unix filesystem using one of these machines, is there > any way (short of writing a device driver) to read it on the other? > I'm curious about compatibility with SPARCstation drives as well, but > I'm not as concerned because I don't use those frequently. I really doubt that the filesystems would be compatible since the endianism of those machines differs; 68000s are big-endian and the VAX is little-endian (or is that vice-versa? I can never remember). -- =============================================================================== Roger Ivie 35 S 300 W Logan, Ut. 84321 (801) 752-8633 ===============================================================================
uno@ttidca.TTI.COM (Stan Uno) (12/19/90)
In article <AbPCdOm00VI8APgkFd@andrew.cmu.edu> dd26+@andrew.cmu.edu (Douglas F. DeJulio) writes: >I've got a NeXTstation at home with a 3.5" floppy drive, and a >VAXstation at the office with a 3.5" floppy drive. If I format a >floppy with a unix filesystem using one of these machines, is there >any way (short of writing a device driver) to read it on the other? >I'm curious about compatibility with SPARCstation drives as well, but >I'm not as concerned because I don't use those frequently. 1) In general, use a more transportable format like tar(1) for writing the data to the floppy. File systems are rarely compatible across different hardware architectures, Unix OS levels, etc. I.e., you'd end up writing more than a device driver to use it a file system on floppy from another machine... 2) I believe you still might have problems if the requisite physical block size should differ on two different machines. Hope that helps without being too obtuse. Anyone got the blocksizes handy for any of the more popular machines? Stan Uno New Technology Group Advanced Technology Section Citicorp/TTI Mail zone Q4 3100 Ocean Park Blvd. Santa Monica, CA 90405 (213) 450-9111 ext 3807 (213) 450-7962 (FAX) (213) 450-3932 (TTI FAX) Usenet mapped: uno@tti.com