tape copy and disk format questions

[Chuck Karish]

In article <4601 at drivax.UUCP> braun at drivax.UUCP (Karl T. Braun (kral)) wrote:
>1)	How does one make a copy of the BSD distribution tape?  It's not a 
>	tar tape, and not a dump tape; I need to make an 'image' copy.
>	Someone suggested using tcopy, but I don't seem to have that (unless
>	it's new to 4.3)

	If you have 4.3 on line, look at /usr/sys/dist/maketape.

	The first file on the tape is written by `dd' with a block size
	of one block (512 bytes), and the others use 10K.  Files after
	the first one are tar files; some vendors (DEC, for one)
	compress them, but Berkeley doesn't.

	It's easy to write a shell script to use 'dd' to take the files
	off the tape and put them on another one.  If your disks are
	cramped, you'll have to use 'mt' to skip files, and do a lot of
	tape swapping.

	Chuck Karish		hplabs!hpda!mindcrf!karish
	(415) 493-7277		karish at forel.stanford.edu