[SunRescue] SunOS tape images

[BSD Bob]

> Hi everyone,
>  At work, I do security testing. I have to go review some bugs in some
> ANCIENT SunOS. I have a machine, I even have a tape drive, but no tapes.
> The standard was QIC-150, right?

QIC 11 on the earliest (4 trackers) and QIC 24 (9 trackers, 60mb) on
the later ones.  I have yet to run across a sparc tape set on 150mb
tapes.  Anyone know if they exist?  It might be neat to dredge up a
sun4 set, before they go bellyup.  The latest I have run across is 4.1,
but I am assuming a 4.1.1 existed for sun4.  My 4/260 originally had
that on it, but I had to fall back to an old 4.1 tape when the HD's
developed trouble.  A script to do a 150mb tape exists in the sun3
archive, so you might be able to adapt that, provided you can dittle
the xdrtoc files and come up with the right munix bits.  There was
a script to do that somewhere on the net, but I never got it to
work correctly.

> I had a rather outlandish idea of trying to write the tape images to a CD
> and installing from that. Does anyone know if this will work?

Won't work that I know of.   Several things are different between them.
The xdrtoc, the install scripts (I think), the boot loader, and maybe
some other things (kernel?).  I tried.... didn't work on the old suntoyz.
You can upgrade a tape to a later set, by overlaying later bits onto
the tape, in the correct sequence.  The tape loaders don't care what
gets loaded, just that they are in the right location, and the right
type of file.

Any others try this sort of thing?

Bob