*BSD News Article 91877


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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
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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
-- 
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