Interfacing with the outside world

Image exchange via SCSI

Copying from a SCSI drive to the PC

Here, we need to read the SCSI drive and copy the contents to a file. In Linux or OSX this is pretty easy: The dd command allows to access the device at low level. For SCSI this means to copy the sectors.

If your drive is attached as sdb (you can find out using the fdisk command), you issue the following command:

dd if=/dev/sdb of=dumpfile bs=256 count=1015808

Note that you do not provide a device name like sdb1 or sdb2: You simply do not have any partitioning in the TI/Geneve environment. When dd returns, we should have the contents in a file called dumpfile. The count parameter prevents dd to read past 248 MiB which cannot be handled in the TI/Geneve file system anyway. The bs parameter is the block size, which may be set as large as the size of an allocation unit. It does not play an essential role here.

If you want to use the image in MESS, you should continue with reading MESS HD Preparation.

Copying from the PC to a SCSI drive

Similarly, if your drive is attached as sdb, type in

 dd if=dumpfile of=/dev/sdb bs=256

Caution: I assume you are already wise enough that you know what you are doing. Double-check whether you have used the right device names. Make sure (really sure) that you are not about to overwrite your PC hard drive. The system will not ask you whether you really mean to overwrite your drive. Anyway, in case something goes wrong, you'll just restore your backup which you hopefully create regularly.