Has anyone tried to clone the NS/OS install cd's onto a hard disk or non cd removable disk? The CD drive I have is so slow, that it takes forever to install the OS. Can the hard disk cloning procedure be used for this? Is the boot information on the cd special/different from the boot info that "disk" would copy. Can I make an .iso file of the cd, and somehow write that to the disk? It would be nice to have it on one of my Jaz cartridges, for example, so I could just use it instead of the apple or sun cdrom drive, as it should be much faster.
Chef
Very interesting idea.
I suppose you could use any of the filesystem "clone" or "dump" utilities to accomplish this.
it seems possible to create a filesystem on a Jaz cart then 'dump' the filesystem from the CDs onto the Jaz.
You could also 'dd' the disk onto a filesystem.
Once that part is done, it should be trivial to make it bootable, either by cloning the boot sector from a floppy, or a bootable HD partition.
Of course, Build Disk may be an option as well.
My Openstep machine is not up, so I can't verify..
My concern is that the cd may have a "special" boot procedure that starts the install process that may not be transferred correctly with a standard "disk/dump/restore" process. I intend to try it when I get back to the office on friday, so I should have more info by the weekend.
Chef
Someone was able to clone a NEXTSTEP install CD to hard drive with Linux:
http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=71http://users.adelphia.net/~dialtr/next.htmlI'm guessing it would work with the dd command under NEXTSTEP too.
Thats strange. I did a search on here before asking the question, and did not find that posting. Good to know it worked for one person, so I am not completely in the dark on this one. Does anyone think the blocksize really matters for this.
Chef
Fired off a dd command to see what would happen this morning, and it is still running. I know the sun cdrom is slow, but it is going on over 3 hours and it is still running. Here is the command I am using below. The cdrom is sd2, and the jaz drive sd1, and I used the raw devices, and the default 512b block size, as the link referenced above suggested.
dd if=/dev/rsd2a of=/dev/rsd1a
It is still working, as the lights on both the cdrom and jaz are flashing with activity, but it seems to be taking a long time. Updates to follow.
Chef