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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!feed1.news.erols.com!howland.erols.net!news.sgi.com!csulb.edu!hammer.uoregon.edu!news.uoregon.edu!Symiserver2.symantec.com!news From: tedm@agora.rdrop.com Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: "device not configured" & other issues Date: 17 Nov 1996 19:16:53 GMT Organization: Symantec Corp. Lines: 41 Message-ID: <56nob5$b6o@Symiserver2.symantec.com> References: <56m5t0$lgu@shellx.best.com> Reply-To: tedm@agora.rdrop.com NNTP-Posting-Host: shiva1.central.com X-Newsreader: IBM NewsReader/2 v1.2.5 In <56m5t0$lgu@shellx.best.com>, tporczyk@best.com (Tony Porczyk) writes: > >mass replicated. Any recommendations on the most efficient method of >accomplishing it (tape drives, unfortunately, will not be apart of the >hardware setup)? I cannot answer your other question, but I can give you a pointer to mass replication. There is a program that I have used written by CSC (Corporate Systems Center) 408-743-8735 that can do block-copies to hard disks. What you do is make up a bootable DOS floppy disk with this program on it, (it's a 50K DOS program) plus network drivers for your favorite NOS. I have used it with Novell NetWare, but it should work with Windows NT (using the DOS NT requestors) or with NFS using Novell's LanWP for DOS NFS driver. Basically, the autoexec.bat on the DOS floppy boots dos, loads the DOS SCSI aspi drivers for your SCSI card, loads the DOS network drivers and shell, and sets up a drive letter mapped to a server disk on your network. Anyhow, you run this program and it uses ASPI to talk to the disk drive, and DOS calls to talk to the fileserver. The program can either copy an entire disk drive to or from a file. The copy is performed sector-by-sector, it is NOT a filesystem copy. The result is that you can essentially make an image copy of the entire disk drive to a file, then "stamp out" as many copies of this disk as you want. Because it is doing a sector-by-sector copy you can have any filesystem you want on the source disk, the program copies everything, partition table, boot sector, filesystem, etc. The program even purports to work between disks of dissimilar geometries. (although the target obviously cannot be smaller than the source) It will also work between different SCSI ID's on the same SCSI adapter, or multiple disks. You could, for example, set up a SCSI adapter and stuff 5 additional disk drives onto it, then use this program to image all 5 disks directly from the master disk. There is another program like this that I have also used called "dimage" which was written by Novell that works in a similar fashion. It is used a lot with Novell educational partners. Unfortunately, it is only available to NEAP's or internal to Novell. (In fact, I understand the programmer who wrote it has since left the company and Novell cannot even modify the program anymore because they don't have anyone left who understands it)