I thought some people might be interested in a in-the-wild use of tomsrtbt... The box I'm recovering is a headless Linux box with a floppy tape drive (TR-3). A few weeks ago, I believe I accidentally hosed some header files while playing with uclibc. Rather than try to fix it piece-by-piece, I decided to use the tape drive and recover the entire partition. This computer only has 3 partitions ( /boot & /usr/local are separate), so it's safer to use something like tomsrtbt and just blow the entire partition away and restore. Here's a blow-by-blow account on recovery with 1.7.334. Downloaded 1.7.334 but noticed ftape modules are still for the old 2.0.38 kernel. Decided to rebuild and use the box's 2.2.18 kernel. Booted regular computer (with monitor) with tomsrtbt, made a filesystem-in-a-file via loopback on the hard drive and unpacked tomsrtbt there. Erased emacs and then grabbed 2.2.18 kernel from the computer to replace tomrtbt kernel. Not enough room, so I deleted pcmcia stuff. Plenty of room now... Added a few things to get serial terminal going and then built a new tomsrtbt with no problems. Booted new tomsrtbt on the box, but insmod would not insert ftape modules correctly. Found a statically compiled insmod in the RH 6.2 distro, dumped that on floppy and copied into /tmp directory. Ftape modules insmod correctly now. Got tape drive running and tried to view archive contents. Seemed to work fine.... :) I use the archiver afio. It makes a cpio-like archive but allows you to gzip each file individually, which is what I do. Afio does this by piping files over a certain size, 10k with my settings, to gzip for compression. Awhile ago I made a version of afio linked to the libc5 of tomsrtbt, which I keep with the ftape kernel modules on a spare disk. When I started to read and restore the tape archives using afio, I noticed that the gzipped files weren't get decompressed; the pipe just died. I guess Busybox gzip can't handle pipes? :( After thinking for a bit, I checked the Linux side of my dual-booter for 1.7.185 of tomsrtbt, found it (wooh!) and made a disk of that. Booted that disk on the dual booter, and grabbed the old version of gzip and dumped it onto a floppy to take over to the computer I was trying to restore. With the old version of gzip, I was able to successfully pull the files off the tape and restore the entire partition! Now that I have that all worked out, I'm going to see how much more stuff I can cram onto the custom tomsrtbt disk and keep that disk and another with the ftape modules set aside specifically to recover that computer. Douglas Bollinger Mt. Holly Springs, PA My other computer runs Linux.
