News Group Posts

copy old xenix diskette

From: Bela Lubkin <belal@sco.com>
Subject: Re: How to copy a tar diskette
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 07:26:58 GMT
References: <2379900.1042433649@dbforums.com> 

rcnewton wrote:

> I have a program I purchased for an old Xenix system on a 1.2 mb 5 1/4"
> floppy diskette.  It appears to be in tar format. Tar tv shows the files
> with leading ./'s.
> 
> I would like to copy it to a 3 1/2" 1.44 mb diskette in the original
> format for installation.   I tried extracting it to a temporary
> subdirectory thinking I could then tar it back to the 3.5 diskette but
> unfortunately it extracts it to multiple subdirectories.
> 
> I haven't had to do this before.  Any help appreciated !

Stuart J. Browne suggested several ways.

At first I read this as you were going to try installing the Xenix
_operating system_ from different size diskettes.  I know that doesn't
work, the install code is different on each size of disk, expects to
find the rest of the install on the same type of disk as it was
originally shipped on.

For an installable app, transferring to a different size disk should
work.

Stuart wrote:

>     mkdir -p /tmp/files
>     cd /tmp/files
>     tar xvf /dev/fd0
>     tar cvf /dev/fd1 ./*

This should work, with a couple of subtleties.  One is this: the
original archive might be absolute (files named "/path/to/file"); it
might be dot-relative ("./path/to/file"); or it might be
nothing-relative ("path/to/file").

If it's absolute, the steps above will fail since the extraction step
writes all over your root.  You can safely extract such an archive with
the "A" flag:

      tar xvfA /dev/fd0

but you will still have trouble creating a new archive with the same
layout.  Fortunately, absolute is pretty unlikely.

Dot-relative vs. nothing-relative might not matter; it depends on the
program's install script.  Stuart's `tar cvf /dev/fd1 ./*` creates a
dot-relative archive; if the original was nothing-relative, you would
want to use `tar cvf /dev/fd1 *`.

None of these will capture dot-files in the root of the install.  That
is, if the archive originally contained:

  ./path/to/file
  ./.mydotfile

".mydotfile" will not match "*".

All in all, the `dd` method is much less likely to introduce vagaries
which might trip up the program's install script.

>Bela<
 

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