For some reason, I had thought you were wanting to use dd to copy disk to tape backup in the event of disk failure.

So, yes, good that disk to disk works for you.

The attached dds3 tape drive you mentioned earlier would enable you to create a more "portable" backup to tape and give you more flexibility in your restore options - using the previously mentioned backup scripts.


Gilles Schipper 
Sent via mobile
416-702-7900

On 2013-03-25, at 6:13 PM, Dennis Grevenstein <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Am 25.03.2013 um 21:24 schrieb Gilles Schipper <[log in to unmask]>:
> 
>> The dd backup that you are contemplating will do you no good if you were to ever need it.
>> 
>> You certainly will not be able to boot from it, and the "files" contained therein would be difficult, if not impossible, to restore - not to mention the very important directory component of your system.
> 
> I'm not sure, what to say, maybe I am really doing something wrong here.
> But that's exactly what I did. Originally, I wanted to attach the disk to
> another machine, but couldn't find one where I could easily plug in
> an SCA SCSI disk. Since the A500 is rather common hardware at
> the chipset level, I thought I would just download a Debian HPPA
> netinst ISO and install Linux on a spare SCSI disk. It worked fine
> for the most part, although Linux seems to have some problems
> with the onboard tulip ethernet which works, but only at 10Mbit/s.
> I did a full backup of the MPE/IX system disk like this:
> dd if=/dev/sdb of=backup_of_my_disk.img
> This gave me a 36GB file which I then again wrote back to a new
> 72GB SCSI disk. This really takes a lot of time, but the system boots
> up just fine from the new disk.
> 
> :discfree E                                                                     
> 
> DISCFREE A.50.01 Copyright (C) Hewlett-Packard 1992.  All rights reserved.      
>                         MON, MAR 25, 2013,  9:15 PM                            
> 
> ALL MEASUREMENTS ARE IN SECTORS.                                                
> ALL PERCENTAGES ARE RELATIVE TO THE DEVICE SIZE.                                
> 
>           |    Configured     |      In Use       |     Available     |        
> -----------+-------------------+-------------------+-------------------+        
> 
> TOTALS :                                                                        
> Device    |  284527984        |    7354320 (  3%) |  277173664 ( 97%) |        
> Permanent |  210550704 ( 74%) |    6886880 (  2%) |  203663824 ( 72%) |        
> Transient |  210550704 ( 74%) |     467440 (  0%) |  210083264 ( 74%) |        
> 
> What puzzles me is the recognized disk size. I had expected
> that it would only recognize 36GB, but
> ((284527984 * 256) / 1024) / 1024 = 69464MB
> It seems like MPE/IX for some reason knows that it's now running
> from a 72GB disk. Unless I made a mistake of course.
> 
>> As far as the serial connections are concerned, your A500 would have 3 such serial ports - one for the native console, one for a remote console modem, and one for a UPS connection.
> 
> right. I found the serial splitter cable now.
> 
>> The HP terminal you have should work fine with the console port in HP mode.
> 
> I could get it to work. Unfortunatly for some reason unknown to me,
> it stopped working again. I can plug the very same cable that used
> to work with the 700/92 into my USB-serial adapter and it works.
> 
>> As Donna suggested, QTERM, the terminal emulator for the PC from AICS-research should work fine, once you've configured and enable network access to your A500.
> 
> 
> I don't have a PC, sorry. I'm just using minicom, which is a common
> terminal emulator, on a Mac.
> 
> In the meantime, I also found out how to open the posix shell
> which makes me feel a little bit more at home. Now that I can
> safely store the original harddisk, I will play with the machine
> some more and read some documentation on how to configure
> the system. Thank you all.
> 
> Someone here also offered to check on where one can get
> a gcc binary. I would really like to know where to download
> this, because I couldn't find it anywhere.
> 
> Dennis
> 
> -- 
> Don't suffer from insanity...
> Enjoy every minute of it.
> 
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