Re: A possibly foolish technical question...

[Bruce Smith <bruce@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> >> > True, I was assuming that you'd to be wanting access to a DOS floppy.  
> >> Maybe, but not nessesarily. As I said in my original message, this seems to be
> >> true of other things, like ZIP drives. I also think it's true of some tapes.
> >
> >Hummmm, I've made bootable tapes, I've even partitioned DAT tapes,
> >but I've never seen anything that even mentioned mounting a tape.
> >
> >If you come across anything that talks about mounting tapes, please send 
> >it (or the URL) my way.  I'd be interested in talking a look.  Thanks!
> In my wandering through tape and backupland, I've seen device access issues and
> building filesystems on tapes (instead of archives). For all I know, there's a
> welter of other devices [how many devices in a "welter"? sorry :)] that are 
> treated the same way... and the last time I looked, the number of devices 
> wasn't getting any smaller!

I've seen filesystems built on tape.  That's how bootable HPUX tapes
are made, but the tapes still cannot be mounted.  When a system
boots from tape, the tape filesystem is read into a ramdisk to run.

I also remember reading in the newsgroups, at least in the HPUX
world, that there is no way to mount a tape.  I also know that Linux
can do a lot more "creative" things than HPUX, so maybe the feature
exists in Linux somewhere.  If you come across it, let me know.

Thanks,

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Bruce Smith                bruce@armintl.com
System Administrator / Network Administrator
Armstrong International, Inc.
Three Rivers, Michigan  49093  USA
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