by Fellow Linux enthusiasts,
I have been trying to restore a UMSDOS file system on my laptop
and although I have almost completely succeeded, some problems
refuse to go away. I'm hoping someone might have some suggestions
on how to fix them, or some assurance that they're not important.
Here's a list of what I did. (BTW I'm using Slackware 3.1 and DOS
6.22 on the laptop.)
(1) From Linux, I created a gzipped tar file of my entire Linux
file system (except the /DOS subdirectory) and placed it in the
/DOS subdirectory.
(2) I backed up all of the DOS files on the laptop *except* the
C:\LINUX directory via an INTERSVR/INTERLNK connection between
the laptop and my office PC, and Colorado tape software.
(I thought it would be better to back up the gzipped tar file created
in (1) rather than the C:\LINUX directory, because of the apparent
63-character limit on file paths in DOS. I'll admit this might have
been unnecessary, but once when I was exploring the C:\LINUX
subdirectory from plain DOS I thought I saw an error message about
exceeding this limit, so I thought it best to create a native tar
backup.)
(3) As an experiment, I compressed the DOS file system with DRVSPACE,
and then tried to re-boot the Linux system on the disk from a floppy.
Nothing in the UMSDOS docs said this could be done, but nothing said
it couldn't be done either. I wasn't too hopeful, but I decided to
find out. Guess what -- you can't do it.
(4) I reformatted the laptop disk and restored the DOS filesystem from
the tape. All was well with DOS, so I proceeded to try to restore
Linux from the tar file. That's when things got interesting. After
trying a number of procedures that appeared to fail for one reason or
another, I achieved almost complete success by doing the following:
- (boot Slackware 3.1 UMSDOS installation disks)
- mount -t umsdos /dev/hda1 /mnt
- (copy previously extracted "passwd" and "group"
files to /etc on the ramdisk.)
- cd /mnt
- mkdir linux
- umssync -v+ linux
- cd linux
- umask 0000
- tar xvfz ../linux.taz > ../linlog 2> ../linerr
After this was done, linerr contained the following 5 error messages:
tar : Could not create directory : No such file or directory
tar : Could not make tmp/.X11-unix/X7 : Invalid argument
tar : Could not make tmp/.X11-unix/X0 : Invalid argument
tar : Could not make dev/log : Invalid argment
tar : Could not make dev/printer : Invalid argument
Should I be concerned about these messages? Interestingly enough,
the first one apparently refers to a blank file name, and the files
/dev/log and /dev/printer were created despite the last two messages!
Comments would be most welcome, including suggestions on better ways
to back up a Linux UMSDOS system. (I know some of you will suggest
using PLIP, and also ext2. Eventually I want to, but these are not
options at the moment.)
Cheers,
Stephen Kerr