On Fri, Nov 20, 1998 at 03:41:02PM +0100, drochner@zel459.zel.kfa-juelich.de wrote:
> Just a dumb question: How are these created?
> 
> I tried to get this working on the i386, and
> while it seems to work with a simple tar file
> on a single floppy, I couldn't create a multi-
> volume archive.
> If I understand it correctly, the volume size
> must be 1432k -- 8k left for bootstrap.
> So I tried
> tar -c -f <tarfile> -M -l 1432 -V USTARFS <files>
> But this created output files of length 1440k,
> probably tar's 10k default blocksize caused this.
> But if I specify a smaller blocksize, eg
> -b 1
> tar coredumps at the beginning of the second volume.

DO NOT create NetBSD distribution or boot images with GNU tar.  As I rather
rudely discovered a few days ago, though GNU tar can correctly *extract*
device nodes with our new "wide" format, it totally screws up when creating
a tar file with them in it.

Sigh.

Use pax -w.

Thor