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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.ysu.edu!news.radio.cz!newsbastard.radio.cz!news.radio.cz!CESspool!btnet-feed2!unlisys!cs.tu-berlin.de!zrz.TU-Berlin.DE!IN-Berlin.DE!fub!mind.de!nostromo.in-berlin.de!ripley From: ripley@nostromo.in-berlin.de (H. Eckert) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Tape file system Date: 24 Mar 1997 00:19:59 GMT Organization: Private access site (FreeBSD 2.1-R), Berlin, Germany, Europe Lines: 32 Message-ID: <slrn5jbi5f.t0.ripley@nortobor.nostromo.in-berlin.de> References: <5h0pfc$7vg@fu-berlin.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: nortobor.nostromo.in-berlin.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: slrn (0.8.8.2 UNIX) Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:37683 gusw@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Gunther Schadow): > is it possible to write a file system onto a tape and then mount it > like a disk? Wasn't this possible on the VAX? On HP-UX you can even > boot from tapes, can't you? When I tried to write a disklabel onto > the tape, it doesn't work due to missing IOCTLs for the st0 driver. > Newfs doesn't work then either. Will it be easy to emulate a disk > with a tape drive? Or do we need a separate tape filesystem driver? This isn't possible AFAIK. The VAX isn't a good example for this as it does this when running VMS (which despite the POSIX tweaking is an entirely different operating system) but not under Ultrix. Booting from a tape is an entirely different matter as well as it doesn't require real file-system like operations on the tape but rather reads a setup system into memory and uses it like a ram disk. This is sort of similar to booting from floppy disk and using the standalone sysinstall and the fixit disk. That a PC cannot boot from a tape drive is a limitation of its BIOS firmware (and we all know how stupid that stuff is). If you really want to have some kind of tapefs you'll certainly have to write a driver. Why don't you just start writing one ? :-) Greetings, Ripley -- H. Eckert, 10777 Berlin, Germany ISO 8859-1: Ä=Ae, Ö=Oe, Ü=Ue, ä=ae, ö=oe, ü=ue, ß=sz. "(Technobabbel)" (Jetrel) - "Müssen wir uns diesen Schwachsinn wirklich anhören?" (Neelix)