20 Nov
2001
20 Nov
'01
1:23 a.m.
-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Erlacher [mailto:edick@idcomm.com]
drive are to be found in the tape image, I'd
submit it would
be a mite tedious.
Well, I didn't say it would be easy ;) It's one of those things that is
theoretically simple.
physically identical to the one you started with, i.e.
same
number of heads,
cylinders, sectors, etc, PHYSICALLY, else things fall apart,
since we don't know
how the drive firmware deals with translating from the
block-level commands the
OS may choose to send it, though it doesn't have to, to the
buffers-full of data
that the drive coughs up.
There must be a method of block-by-block access that will give you the
sequence of data you need. Otherwise things would have already fallen
apart, and disks would be write-only devices. :) It probably helps to think
of the filesystem as a data set, rather than a device-dependant entity. The
data is the same, up to a point, no matter what you write it to.
Of course, whether the amount of translation you'd need to do to find that
essential data set is too much work, is arguable....
potentially, to
deal with the data to be transferred to the newly cleaned
drive in the same way
that this particular OS deals with it. Of course, the OS
doesn't know what
you're doing, and doesn't know how to read the data on the
disk, except as raw
data, dealt with in buffer-fulls, and than only using the
code you've written.
I'm not sure I follow your train of thought here. It's early, though.
Regards,
Chris
Christopher Smith, Perl Developer
Amdocs - Champaign, IL
/usr/bin/perl -e '
print((~"\x95\xc4\xe3"^"Just Another Perl
Hacker.")."\x08!\n");
'