"Floppy tape"
Jeffrey L Bromberger
jeffrey at sci.ccny.cuny.edu
Tue Feb 19 03:20:05 AEST 1991
In article <72 at fbits.ttank.com> Mariusz at fbits.ttank.com (Mariusz Stanczak) writes:
>Having recently accuired a tape backup unit (thanks Vince),
>I have the following quiestions:
>
> - has anyone created a standalone boot floppy with
> a configuration that would permit the use of the
> tape unit? What would that entail if I were to
> create one?
Look on OSU - Lenny posted something like this, using the .o's for the
kernel and the tp driver, you made a bootable floppy.
> - even with large blocking (256KB is the largest
> I could enter to `gtar') the unit does not seem
> to "stream" for long... it's runs more like a saw,
> forth and back. Is that it's "beauty"? This be-
> havior makes it VERY slow (though I appreciate
> having the ability to "compress"-backup the whole
> 44MB on one cart :-)). Any work-arounds (`dbuf'
> does help some, but not enough)?
I was working on this for a while, but gave up in disgust. There was
*no* documentation on the driver interface! Even with a little help
from some friends, it was still pretty ugly. There was no
*distributed* tp.h file, and the man page for qt(7) is positively not
what we have - there were no working QIC-02 boards for the general
public.
What probably has to be done is to make a diffent kind of dbuf (maybe
tbuf?) that stores huge data chunks. If you can push enough
data at the tape, you can get about a 6.5 second stream, the most I
ever saw :-( If anyone ever managed to get it to really stream, I'd
be delighted to hear how!!
j
--
Jeffrey L. Bromberger
System Operator---City College of New York---Science Computing Facility
jeffrey at sci.ccny.cuny.edu jeffrey at ccnysci.BITNET
Anywhere!{cmcl2,philabs,phri}!ccnysci!jeffrey
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