Mount Floppy

ortega · Post by **ortega** » 17 Oct 2006 04:31

Hi! I first tried to mount the floppy just to see if it's possible - I was interested to see what swinst saves in it. Then, I continued to try to mount it in order to also mount the disk. If I can't mount the floppy, I guess It's useless to try to mount the disk. It's the first time I deal with Unix systems this old. But I won't give up

. Take care.

alurfe · Post by **alurfe** » 18 Oct 2006 03:45

Sun has abandoned the development CHOrusOS and has published the source code. you can download and try to install Chorus os and mount floppy. this is the link http://www.experimentalstuff.com/Techno ... d11obe2jql

or you can search with google.

best regards.

ibuza · Post by **ibuza** » 18 Oct 2006 12:16

ortega wrote:When you make the backup to the disk it uses far more space so I want the files in the floppy (in order to retrieve them through analog line).

If you do a backup to the harddisk with just the mao-data (without accounting) the filesize should be smaller than a floppy.
Which version has the 4400?
Even the oldest 4400 should be able to write a daily backup to /usr4/BACKUP/DAY which should be as small as possible.

ortega wrote: I've been trying the command: mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy -s [file system] with all file systems I know but without success.

You could try to observ what commands swinst uses when accessing the floppy:

while [ 1 ];do ps|tail >>procsup;echo .>>procsup;done&

This command repeatedly writes the last lines of the process-list in a file "procsup".
The "&" at the end makes it a background process which has to be killed after you are done! That is very important otherwise it would write to the harddisk until it is full.
Start swinst and list the floppy-content or do a backup on the floppy. After that analyse which processes had been started with:

more procsup

For example the first command on a Release 5.0UX System when i tried to list the floppy contents was:

dd if=/dev/rfd0 count=2

Since there was no disk in the drive I could not get any further.

Regards
Jörg

ortega · Post by **ortega** » 20 Oct 2006 12:10

Hi, Jörg!

Thanks for your answer. I did as you said but the only processes I found in the procsup file different from the normal processes that are running in the system were

multivol
cpio
gzip

No swinst or dd or anything else. Obviously swinst is using those processes but shouldn't appear some other processes?

The script puts the last lines of ps in the file with wich frequency? Once a second?

Thanks for your attention.

ibuza · Post by **ibuza** » 21 Oct 2006 02:15

ortega wrote:I did as you said but the only processes I found in the procsup file different from the normal processes that are running in the system were

multivol, cpio, gzip

No swinst or dd or anything else. Obviously swinst is using those processes but shouldn't appear some other processes?

Did you only see the name of the command or also the parameters. The parameters could give a hint which drive is used (devicename) and how it is accessed.

ortega wrote:The script puts the last lines of ps in the file with wich frequency? Once a second?

Depends only how fast the CPU is. As soon as it is done with writing the last lines of ps it does it again without pause.

But maybe you have to try it serveral times. The mounting of a device does not take long. That event could be missed by this simple script. The commands multivol, cpio, gzip have obviously to do with the compressing and writing of the data and take much longer.

Regards
Jörg

ibuza · Post by **ibuza** » 21 Oct 2006 04:19

ibuza wrote:
ortega wrote:I did as you said but the only processes I found in the procsup file different from the normal processes that are running in the system were
multivol, cpio, gzip
No swinst or dd or anything else. Obviously swinst is using those processes but shouldn't appear some other processes?
Did you only see the name of the command or also the parameters. The parameters could give a hint which drive is used (devicename) and how it is accessed.

1. you cold not see any command-parameters because only ps was used and not ps -f oder ps -ef. Right "script" would have been:
while [ 1 ];do ps -f|tail >>procsup;echo .>>procsup;done&

2. But I did a little bit more research what the PBX actually does if you type "swinst". It is an alias which just starts "su - swinst". It switchs the user and starts a shell script. The script which is started for reading backups can be found here:
more /usr2/soft_install/bin/Bck_Restore

When I looked at the script I realized that swinst does not mount the floppy at all. There should be no real filesystem on the disk. It just packs the data and uses dd and multivol to write them to disk starting with sector 2 to the end of the disk.
When you select the option "List content of a save floppy disk" it does not mount the floppy and do a "ls" on the path of the floppy. It reads the whole disk with dd and filters the filenames.

So you have to use dd, cpio and/or gunzip to get the file to the harddisk.

Regards
Jörg

ortega · Post by **ortega** » 24 Oct 2006 11:13

Thanks a lot, Jörg, for your research. Now I can see why I couldn't mount it

.

Your tips in how to see what processes of Chorus are doing were usefull, too. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.