If you want to boot A/UX from the cartridge don't forget to make a swap partition on it and set the kernel value SWAPCNT to the size of the partition. Don't make eschatology partitions. They are for backup; and you don't need to backup the backup disk.
A good way of copying files to a syquest disk is to mount it as /syquest and do
find /dir -depth -print | cpio -puldma /syquest
which will create /syquest/dir and copy over /dir and all subdirectories to the cartridge. Next time you do it, leave out the "u" in "-puldma" and only files that have changed since the last copy will be copied. Great. This method will also copy over the files in /dev.
You don't need to partition each cartridge. Just format it, make sure block 0 is blank (use dd to check or to clear it) use pname to recognize slice 31 and you can use it as c?d?s31. It won't work under Mac OS, of course. To be able to boot from a cartridge you will need a small Mac OS partition plus root and swap partitions.
If your formatting software does not let you create A/UX partitions then you will have to do them under A/UX using dp. You can also format the cartridge under A/UX using the diskformat command and size 512. I suggest making a script to use dp so that you can do more than one cartridge quickly. An example might be something like:
dp /dev/rdsk/c4d0s31 << EOF
I7
a1 8 86662 SyQuest y 0 86662 0 1 y y
wq
EOF
Make sure you always unmount the disk before removing it. Otherwise, you will lose data. The SCSI disk driver should be modified so that the cartridge can only be removed when a umount is done. This is a simple modification.
Remember to do a fsck on the device before you mount it each time. It's easy to forget, because it is not done automatically (unless you put the drive into /etc/fstab). The consequences of using a disk that has not been fsck'ed can be serious, if there are filesystem errors on the disk that fsck could have fixed. (That is, these errors can occur if the Macintosh crashes, or if you forget to unmount the disk before removing it).
Article Change History:
31 Mar 1995 - Made minor changes.
31 Aug 1992 - Reviewed for technical accuracy.
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