On 08/10/2016 09:45 AM, jim stephens wrote:
On 8/10/2016 7:04 AM, Tor Arntsen wrote:
On 10 August 2016 at 15:22, <asw...@t-online.de> wrote:
I successfully took a (factory new) DEC TSZ07 SCSI tape
drive into operation using a Sun SS20 and a Linux box.
Now I do have a big pile of CDC, DEC, HP, Convex and IBM
tapes and I'd like to create tape images to file to save
the tapes content.
What is the to be preferred procedure to image the
tapes, which software to use and which kind of format to
store the images?
fwiw, I made my own format when I archived all my old
tapes. A very simple one:
- I read the tape record by record
- The output disk file contains a 4-byte integer in big
endian format,
followed by one record.
- The 4-byte integer contains the physical record size as
read from the tape.
- Then another 4-byte value plus a new record, and so on.
- End-of-file markers are encoded by using 0 as the value
for the
4-byte integer, with no record following (logically enough).
I'd find a way to get it to some format acceptable to simh
as a lot of the tapes you have will probably work on
emulators. There are already utilities for going to and
from that, and perhaps even some that will compile and run
on your hardware to go from SCSI devices or serial block
devices to that format.
I did something similar. I already had some tape container
unpackers for other systems. I had some old VMS BACKUP
tapes that I wanted to unpack. First, I extracted the save
set from the container file, just turning it into a byte
stream. Then, I fed it to the vmsbackup program, available
from Stephen Hoffman.
The command is :
vmsbackup -xe -b 8192 -f <filename>
and it will build the directory tree where you currently
are. (If blocksize is not 8192, substitute in above command.)
It was REALLY COOL to have my entire VMS home directory tree
magically appear on my Linux system!
I believe I had to compile vmsbackup from source, there were
some executables online but they were out of date.
Jon
