Using streamer tape images with VirtualBox?

[robcfg]

Hello everyone!

I'm trying to install an old UnixWare system in a VirtualBox VM. The installation media consist of 3 disks, which work beautifully, and two streamer tapes.

I have created an image of tapes using the dd command under Linux, but I don't find the way to make them work under VirtualBox.

So the questions are fairly obvious. Can it be done? Is it planned for a future release? Is there any way I can help you?

Thanks a lot!

[michaln]

So the questions are fairly obvious. Can it be done? Is it planned for a future release? Is there any way I can help you?

No, no, and maybe.

The question is not so much what format the images are in but how does the guest OS expect to access them? Some kind of FDC-attached tape drive? A SCSI tape drive? Something else?

Most systems should be able to use the tape archives as tar files (that's what 'tar' stands for, after all), but that of course won't help if the OS is supposed to be installed from tape.

[robcfg]

Thank you for your fast answer!

My guess is that the installation program looks for a SCSI bios to access the tape drive.

Also, the machine where I usually have VirtualBox is not the machine that has the tape drive.

I've read in another posts that someone asked if there were a way to virtualize the tape drive and make it run with a SCSI passthrough, but I'm not sure if that really work.

In any case, if there's something I can do to help, please tell me, I'll be glad to.

[michaln]

I've read in another posts that someone asked if there were a way to virtualize the tape drive and make it run with a SCSI passthrough, but I'm not sure if that really work.

For booting off of a tape, it wouldn't. For accessing a tape drive, it might.

In any case, if there's something I can do to help, please tell me, I'll be glad to.

I don't know - because I don't quite understand what it is you actually want... Unless you have a clearly defined set of requirements, I can't even say if it does or doesn't make sense.

[robcfg]

Well, for me the ideal would be to be able to use a tape image the same way diskette, cd and hard drive images are used.

Maybe I could try to install VirtualBox in the machine I have with the tape drive, which is quite old now and try to install UnixWare on a VM from the actual installation media. Do you think that would work?

Thanks!

[Martin]

To be able to boot from a tape the SCSI controller would need to have tape boot support in the controller bios. That is not available in any virtual PC environment I know.

[michaln]

Well, for me the ideal would be to be able to use a tape image the same way diskette, cd and hard drive images are used.

You'll have to be a lot more technical than that... a tape isn't a rotational image, so it definitely won't be used the same way as a disk of any kind.

I've never even seen a bootable tape, so I have no idea how these things work. FDC? SCSI? What kind of firmware? How does the OS take over from the firmware?

[robcfg]

Hi,

I'm not trying to boot from the tape, UnixWare comes with a set of installation disks, but the main part of the OS comes in two tapes. After installing the disks, it tries to load the rest of the data from the tapes, but obviously it doesn't detect any tape streamer so I cannot finish the installation.

I don't know if I can use my tape images as a SCSI device under virtualbox.

[JimBeam]

I'm fairly sure you can't use tape images as virtual SCSI tape drives... the GUI does not allow for it in any case. It can emulate SCSI disks but as mentioned before, those work differently (and the commands being sent to them presumably would be different from tape drives - have never dug that deep though).

In theory, emulating tape drives could well be done I suppose...

[JimBeam]

Actually, it seems there is support for SCSI pass-through to the guest so you can pass through a SCSI device to the guest.

Now you need something on the host to emulate a scsi tape drive (and use the tape files as storage).

Searching for virtual SCSI tape, I found this:
http://mhvtl-linux-virtual-tape-library ... 71720.html
No idea what mhvtl is or if it supports what you want but perhaps there's some way of doing it..

[michaln]

I'm not trying to boot from the tape, UnixWare comes with a set of installation disks, but the main part of the OS comes in two tapes. After installing the disks, it tries to load the rest of the data from the tapes, but obviously it doesn't detect any tape streamer so I cannot finish the installation.

I don't know if I can use my tape images as a SCSI device under virtualbox.

As others said, VirtualBox does not emulate any tape devices. Emulating SCSI tape devices might not be a huge amount of work, of course assuming that your guest OS has drivers for one of the SCSI HBAs emulated by VirtualBox.

I've done a bit of research and it looks like there's been an awful lot of completely incompatible tape solutions with custom controllers and everything. However, if you're talking strictly SCSI tape, that might not be so bad. That said, I don't even know what a tape image looks like, whether the images are standardized somehow, etc. etc.

[mpack]

Tape ARchive?

[michaln]

Tape ARchive?

Maybe (TAR obviously crossed my mind). Then again maybe not? I just don't know.

[robcfg]

I tried the tar command on the UnixWare tapes, but they are not in that format, so the only way to get an 'image' of the tape was to use the dd command.

Michal, I'm sending you the images, thank you for your interest!

[michaln]

Yes, thanks for the images! FWIW, the headers of the tape images say "PaCkAgE DaTaStReAm" (camel cased like that). Those should be standard SysV packages. I'm pretty sure the package manager just wants to take those from a raw block device (floppy or tape).