On Fri, 10 Oct 1997 18:54:30 -0700  Jonathan Stone wrote:

> >(4) Has anyone determined the sequence of events required to make a boot
> >    tape on the tk50 drive?  Those with a one-system,one-drive,with-a-tape-
> >    drive setup would most likely jump for joy.
> 
> No. At least, I haven't.  I just don't want to deal with TK50s ever
> again.  If someone sends me a TK50Z and beer-equivalents, i might get
> around to it sometime after I finish my thesis.

Umm, how many TZ50's do you want :-)  Below is some info on bootable
tapes - I don't know how helpful it'll be...

Simon.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
~From: juh@IPA.FhG.de (Juergen Henke)
~Newsgroups: comp.unix.ultrix,comp.sys.dec
~Subject: Re: Get ULTRIX 4.4 from CD to TK70?
~Date: 13 Aug 1994 11:28:42 GMT

>>>>> On 11 Aug 1994 15:58:19 GMT, cjdc@staff.cc.purdue.edu (Chris Christian) said:

Chris> goeran@allcon.net writes:
>>we have the new ULTRIX 4.4 Release on CD-ROM. But our VAX 6000-420 doesn't
>>have any CD-ROM drive in it.

Chris> You coudl swipe a CD-ROM drive from another machine, recompile the kernel
Chris> to allow for the device (although you might have allowed for it already)
Chris> and reboot the machine with the CD-ROM.

This of course he could do, if he had a SCSI interface card in the BI bus
of the 6000 (these interfaces are somewhat expensive).

>>Is there a way to get 4.4 installed with al litte trick? Maybe writing an
>>image of the CD-ROM to an TK70-Tape with "dd" and boot from tape. Or should
>>we get TK70 installation tapes from DEC?

Chris> I've tried this, and could never get it to work.

Some time ago there was a posting in this newsgroup about the contents
of a "setld"able tape and a bootable tape. May be you could use your 4.2
tape to get the bootstrap you need ?

Juergen


----------------------- old posting ----------------------------
~Newsgroups: comp.unix.ultrix
~From: mjr@hussar.dco.dec.com (Marcus J. "will do TCP/IP for food" Ranum)
~Subject: Re: DECstation 5000/240 bootable tape
~Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation, Washington ULTRIX Resource Center
~Date: Mon, 6 Apr 1992 14:16:08 GMT

>> How did you copy the tape?  Did you use dd?

[follows is Allan Rollow's excellent description of a setld tape]

	A setld(8) format tape consists of a number of tapes files
	with a block size of 10 KB.  The 4th file of a setld(8)
	distribution is a tar file that contains the control files
	for the tape; call it INSTCTRL.  In that archive is a file
	that is {something}.image, where the {something} will usually
	be the prefix name of the subset (ULT, DNU, DNP, OLI, etc).
	That file lists all the subsets on tape used for the installation
	and their checksums.  The file names are in the same order
	they are on the tape.  Generally the files are compressed
	tar(1) archives.

	Law of the Universe: There is always an exception to the rule.

	Most MUMBLE.image files list the subsets after the INSTCTRL
	archive.  The exception is the base ULTRIX distribution.  The
	ULT.image (or UDT.image for RISC) lists a subset called ROOT
	this is the 3rd file on the tape.  It was a dump(8) image of
	the root file system used to get the installation started.
	I'd guess that you find /etc/group either in ROOT or U*BASE*
	(ULTBASE### or UDTBASE###).

	Other odds and ends.  At least in the case of TK50s the
	distribution tape is bootable.  Depending on the distribution
	the first two files may be bootable images with a blocksize
	of 512 bytes.  So a tape will look something like:

		+-----------------------+
		|   VAX BOOT.1 bs=512	|
		|	    or		|
		|   RISC BOOT bs=512	|
		+-----------------------+
		|   VAX BOOT.2 bs=512	|
		|	    or		|
		|      SPACE bs=10k	|
		+-----------------------+
		|	ROOT bs=10k	|
		|	    or		|
		|      SPACE bs=10k	|
		+-----------------------+
		|    INSTCTRL bs=10k	|
		+-----------------------+
		|   SUBSET(1) bs=10k	|
		+-----------------------+
		|  SUBSET(...) bs=10k	|
		+-----------------------+
		|  SUBSET(n-1) bs=10k	|
		+-----------------------+
		|   SUBSET(n) bs=10k	|
		+-----------------------+

	From what I seen of V4.0 the MUMBLE.image file is always
	ULT.image.
-- 
"Sometimes if you have a cappuccino and then try again it will work OK."
						- Dr. Brian Reid, 1992
"Sometimes one cappucino isn't enough."
						- Me

--
_________________________________________________________________________
Juergen Henke, e-mail juh@IPA.FhG.de, PSI-mail PSI%4505016002::JUH_IPA
Fraunhofer-Institut f. Produktionstechnik u. Automatisierung
Nobelstrasse 12, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany
(ATK-mail, MIME-mail and Linux questions welcome)