Need help with dumping disk to file on black NeXT

[nuss]

Dear fellow NeXT users, after spending many hours and finding nothing on the forum and web, I'd need some kind help

I tried to backup (dump) my old NeXT harddrive(s) directly on my NeXTstation Turbo with the following methods:

- BlueSCSI contains two HDD image: first with OpenStep, second for holding my backups
- Boot the machine with external BlueSCSI into OpenStep 4.2 (works perfectly fine)
- Switch to Terminal.app as root
- Unmount the real SCSI disks
- cd /BackupDisk ; cp /dev/rsd1a backup1.img   ## takes 20min for 1GB
- cd /BackupDisk ; dd if=/dev/rsd1a of=backup2.img   ## takes >10h for 1GB

Both backup methods create 1GB files that seem to have all the correct data on them (checked with mount on a Linux box), but the file-type indicates the dump to be only partition, not the full disk:

Code Select Expand

Unix Fast File system [v1] (big-endian), last mounted on /Disk, last written at Thu Apr 16 21:48:06 2009, clean flag 1, number of blocks 1054760, number of data blocks 1018739, number of cylinder groups 300, block size 8192, fragment size 1024, minimum percentage of free blocks 10, rotational delay 4ms, disk rotational speed 60rps, TIME optimization
As a result the images can not be used for booting or mounting e.g. in Previous as they have no valid label (amongst other errors).

Is there is a way to backup the full disk "as-is" directly from the NeXTstation, like in Linux with dd /dev/sda instead of partition /dev/sda1?

Thanks & Greets, Nuss

[cuby]

/dev/rsd1h should be the device special file that represents the complete drive on NeXT/Openstep.

[nuss]

Thanks a lot @cuby , I will give it a try.

(and remember now that I saw this "h" device some 25 years ago )

[nuss]

Hi, using rsd1h and rsd2h did the trick. Both hard drive images run now flawlessly in Previous
Thanks a tons for your quick help @cuby !

[cuby]

Great to see it's working for you - you're welcome!