On Tue, 3 Aug 1999, John Wilson wrote:

> I haven't noticed this coming up in a while (probably thanks to net booting)
> but it used to be that people sometimes got stuck because they had no boot
> tapes and their VAX wasn't running yet so they couldn't use it to write
> the boot tapes...  Well in case anyone bumps into this again (do people use
> tape at all any more?), I finally got around to rolling a prettier version
> of my grotty tape hacking program for DOS, so if you can borrow a PC long
> enough to hang a TZ30 or TK50Z-GA off of it, you can use it to write tapes.
> You just need a DOS ASPI driver for whatever SCSI board you have, and then
> you can do this:
> 
> C:\>set tape=scsi2:	(e.g. default HA, target 2, default LUN)
> C:\>st rew		(rewind tape -- do it again if "?Unit attention")
> C:\>st iput filename.ext 512	(write file to tape with bs=512)
> C:\>st weof
> C:\>st rewoffl
> 
> ...  you get the idea, it tries to look like "mt" except it adds the
> "iput" and "iget" commands, and is missing some of the fancier stuff ...

	I have also heard about something, allowing to simulate a tape
driver on PC. Because TK50 is connected to VAX over serial (RS232 I
remember) line, then it should be possible to use PC's serial line and
special simulator program instead of real TK50. Unfortunately, when I
searched through the net, I only saw some pointers to simulator
source code. The code itself was gone... Maybe someone has it?

===========

Elmet Orasson aka Bjv

Homepage (actually not :-) : http://www.pld.ttu.ee/~elmet

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