Copying O/S distribution tapes

[Eric Pearce]

In article <1991Feb10.000235.5209 at ucunix.san.uc.edu> adams at ucunix.san.uc.edu (James Warner Adams) says:
>
>Forgive me if this is a naive question, but I didn't notice anything in
>the docs on this (I only have the online man pages).
>
>Is there some way to make an identical copy of the SunOS 4.1.1
>distribution tapes?  I don't want to keep using the original ones I got
>from Sun.  I'd like to make a backup copy to use and then store the
>original tapes offsite.

For 1/4 inch, there shouldn't be any special tricks, as long as you
copy onto the tape with a block size which is a multiple of 512.

1/2 inch is more complicated.  Under 4.0 and 4.0.3 at least, the
third and fifth files have their first block of 512 bytes and the
rest of the file is in 8k blocks.   

I used scripts like this:

dd if=/dev/nrmt8 of=0 bs=8k 
dd if=/dev/nrmt8 of=1 bs=512
dd if=/dev/nrmt8 of=2.a bs=512 count=1
dd if=/dev/nrmt8 of=2.b bs=8k 
dd if=/dev/nrmt8 of=3 bs=10k 
dd if=/dev/nrmt8 of=4.a bs=512 count=1
dd if=/dev/nrmt8 of=4.b bs=8k
dd if=/dev/nrmt8 of=5 bs=8k
dd if=/dev/nrmt8 of=6 bs=10k
            ...
dd if=/dev/nrmt8 of=25 bs=512
  
I wrote a little C program to copy them two-part file back into single
files on tape.

Once you have it on disk, you can crank out copies.

-e
--

 Eric Pearce eap at bu-pub.bu.edu                             "Get Some!"
 Boston University Information Technology                  - Dispatches