From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: ron@ronnatalie.com (Ronald Natalie) Date: Sun, 19 Nov 2017 17:40:17 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] Determining what was on a tape back in the day In-Reply-To: References: <20171119134109.59F3018C0F5@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <7AA20D14-571A-4AAD-96D0-45057F5B81DD@jctaylor.com> Message-ID: <1CE2C7FC-1FAE-44F7-8DDA-B21D54FA0E43@ronnatalie.com> You can’t mount a regular 9 track or many other types because they weren’t block replaceable. Once you wrote the superblock the second time, you lost the rest of the filesystem. > On Nov 19, 2017, at 5:00 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote: > > On Sun, 19 Nov 2017, Ron Natalie wrote: > >> You could actually mkfs a DECtape and mount it but the system would stall while rewinding to write the superblock. > > The early Sun boxes used to hang when rewinding the cartridge tape, because the controller didn't release the Multibus; the stingy Lionel Singer used to sell the 3/50 as cheap servers... > > And you haven't lived until just for fun you put a file system onto a 9-track tape and ran FSCK on it. > > -- > Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."