On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 5:04 PM Will Senn wrote: > OK, I was able to locate 2bsd.tar.gz and spencer_2bsd.tar.gz in the > archive. Neither is an installation tape. It appears that they are just > tarballs of their respective systems (there are very minor differences > between the two). > > In the TAPE file in the tarball, it talks about reading the tar program > off of the tape using: > dd if=/dev/mt0 bs=1b skip=1 of=tar > > Well, tar is definitely not located at that address, which implies that > the tarball isn't a distro tape. This note in the archive used to read: > > ... > > The remaining gzipped tar files are other 2BSD distributions supplied by > Keith Bostic, except for spencer_2bsd.tar.gz which came from Henry Spencer. > They do not contain installation tape images. The 2.9BSD-Patch directory > contains patches to 2.9BSD dated August 85, and again supplied by Keith Bostic. > > ... > now it reads: > ... > > 2.11BSD 2.11BSD-pl195.tar is a copy of 2.11BSD at patch level 195, supplied > by Tom Ivar Helbekkmo. spencer_2bsd.tar.gz is a version of 2BSD which came > from Henry Spencer. > ... > > I recall having to do something with cont.a files, which are not present on these images. So, my questions is, does anyone know of or have an actual 2bsd tape/tape image? > > Both of the 2bsd tapes you found are from the days when Berkeley just sent patches to the 7th Edition out. The 2.8BSD tape was the first one to have a kernel that was bootable from the tape. The 2BSD tapes originally had 2 files on them. The first one was a binary copy of tar that ran on V7. The second was a tarball of all the rest. As you discovered, they shipped with a label like: Second Berkeley Software Tape May 10, 1979 TAR 800BPI %dd if=/dev/mt0 bs=1b skip=1 of=tar %chmod 755 tar % tar x 10000 blocks but the 2bsd.tar.gz file has just the second file. The spensor_2bsd.tar.gz has a tar binary in it: tar tvf spencer_2bsd.tar.gz | head -rw-r--r-- 0 0 0 24688 Feb 17 1980 tar -rw-r--r-- 0 0 10 3687 Feb 17 1980 tar.1 -rw-r--r-- 0 0 10 456 Feb 17 1980 tar.ms -rw-r--r-- 0 0 10 15216 Feb 17 1980 install.ms if you are looking for that pre-built. If you are looking to create a tape with tar on it to extract other tar tapes, you'd need to use a variation on the maketape.pl with a block size of 1 so the above dd will work on the target system... Warner