aubrey@rpp386.cactus.org (Aubrey McIntosh) (01/16/90)
In the MS-DOS world it is beyond difficult to access the physical drive:
you have to have a special low level program to do it.
On the UCSD-p system, you could access a drive as a raw device and do
a copy, or you could use the file system.
the p-system had a boot record disk description on it, and it worked
not only with different drives, but with different CPUs (with different
byte sex!)
My natural thoughts are to work within the file system only, because it
does a nifty-keen job of knowing where everything is, and keeping it from
getting all together.
All of my tar files are in filesystems with names like cc.T. I can mail
them across town to friends, or keep several on one floppy.
1) What do I gain by doing a tar to a raw floppy?
2) Can we adopt the convention that tar is done to files; modify
build, and alert folks to some extra parameters to dd to preserve
the disk geometry sector?
--
Aubrey McIntosh
comp.os.minix, comp.lang.modula2, soc.culture.celtic
Austin, TX 78723
1-(512)-452-1540 (v)