jf@unido.UUCP (Jan-Hinrich Fessel) (01/17/90)
In article <17672@rpp386.cactus.org> aubrey@rpp386.UUCP (Aubrey McIntosh) writes: > >1) What do I gain by doing a tar to a raw floppy? At least you are able to backup your hard-disk to floppies. This is what I currently do, and I was forced to modify my modified floppy driver (ST) to access raw floppies on other inodes than the ones used for floppies containing filesystems. Now I have both, automatic recognition of disk-geometry for normal use and raw hardcoded floppies ( 10 spt, 11 spt, 9 spt, cylinders from 80 to 84) for use with the pax/tar/cpio utility that I am currently beta-testing. For those who want to know more: tar/pax/cpio supports multiple volume archives, and it can't tell the filesystem to create a new file on the newly inserted disk... Maybe, after getting pax/tar/cpio to work flawlessly (bugs are very few by now) I will try to work out a solution for that problem. But I intend to post results as soon as beta-testing-period is over. --Jan-Hinrich ============================================================================== Jan-Hinrich Fessel , University of Dortmund, Computer Science Dpt. PO Box 500500, D-4600 Dortmund, W-Germany jf@unido.uucp jf@unido.bitnet ==============================================================================
Peter_Van_Epp@cc.sfu.ca (01/17/90)
Since there seems to be a fair amount of interest on the subject of the care and feeding of floppies I'll make a last comment, on consideration the change the boot block idea is a bad one it breaks too many things (I thought of the offset one sector trick, but how do you write a boot disk to say nothing of reading old tar disks!). It seems to me the solution is to specify what type of floppies your system contains (or at least be able to!) on the boot menu. To this end my recently posted FSCK mods have the code to do this installed but ifdefed out. Paul Allen is looking at floppy.c and I am going to leave him to it and proceed with something else. Paul, one further thought on the defined values in boot.h: the value being the number of tracks for the drive would make a lot more sense (no translate table in floppy.c for one!) than the current values of 1 and 2. Specifying the drive on the boot menu also allows any of you with strange drives (there have been reports of an 80 track 720k 5.25 inch drive for instance, or the old 8 inch floppies) to define a type in boot.h and modify floppy.c to deal with them. Peter Van Epp