[Coco] OS-9 HD backup

Gene Heskett gheskett at wdtv.com
Wed Aug 27 18:09:13 EDT 2014


On Wednesday 27 August 2014 15:24:15 Kandur did opine
And Gene did reply:
> Gene, not sure, if Bru was available in 1989, when this backup was
> made. It appears not being compressed, as the raw disk dump shows
> plain text, like this:
> 
> OSTerm V2.0.8 (C) 1989 by Vaughn Cato Copying permitted for non-profit
> use only To furthur the development of superior software, please
> contribute $10.00 to the author at: 1244 E. Piedmont Rd. NE. Marietta,
> Ga. 30062 Special thanks to Phil Zeigler, who thought when I could
> think no longer.
> 
> Hex dump of the start of the file:
> http://qdv.pw/coco/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/config-os9.jpg
> 
The above text is enough to confirm that its not compressed.  Just a raw 
"tarball" but not made by tar.  So BRU is a possibility.  I'll go look at 
one of my floppies of an old bru-1.2 backup & see what they say.  BRB as 
soon as I can stick one in an 80 track ds drive.

I was not able to find a disk I could positively identify as a bru made 
disk.  But then I went looking for the sources and found that I had last 
worked on it in 1992.  So as Mike Sweet didn't release his 1.0 version 
until 1991 or so, that pretty well rules out your 1989 disks as being bru 
built.  Sorry.

What disks I did find, were apparently made by a program that grabbed the 
raw disk and copied it all as a file, split over however many disks it 
would take to do the whole drive, in this case at least 43 or so as in 
this case the drive was about 30 megs, and the image was of an ST-238r, 
the first HD I ever had.  I believe the program may have been called 
archive, but my hand is miles from a book suitable for swearing on.

Sorry I can't be more help other than to rule out BRU, any version.  Its 
too new.

If you look at the dir of a disk that is in the middle of the backup 
series, what do you see?

> Kandur
> 
> Wednesday, August 27, 2014, 11:41:27 AM, you wrote:
> > On Wednesday 27 August 2014 14:06:01 Kandur did opine
> > 
> > And Gene did reply:
> >> My first batch of 28 floppy HD backup set had been restored
> >> from 1989, thanks to Robert Gault's help and his endless patience.
> >> The second  batch of 34 floppy HD backup set, may not have been
> >> made by HDKIT, as it seem to have a different archive structure.
> >> Please look at it, and let me know, if you can recognize it.
> >> http://qdv.pw/coco/?p=289
> >> 
> >> Kandur
> > 
> > Any chance of its being made by either of the 3 BRU's was destroyed
> > by the apparent directory listing shown on that page.
> > 
> > Since we've had several compression methods, I am wondering if
> > perhaps it an HDKIT backup, but HDKIT was configured to use a
> > different, perhaps more effective compression.  Its an avenue I'd
> > explore.  One can often deduce tha compression used by looking at a
> > dump of the first 32 bytes or so of one of the files, which often
> > contains an identifier string.  dEd can show you that information if
> > it can read it at all.
> > 
> > Cheers, Gene Heskett


Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
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