[Info-vax] Backup TK50 tapes

[supervinx]

Before any misunderstanding will occur...
Together with a VAX4000/300 I rescued some original TK50 tapes.
They contain VMS 5.5, 5.5-1 and they seem not to contain any saveset, but only
*.EXE files (VMB.EXE, SYSBOOT.EXE...) so they looks like bootable tapes.
Am I wrong? 
Since I never installed VMS except from a CD, I'm dubious about boot tapes.


I would like to save tape images, because tape units are rare and faulty.
And I'd like to try if simh can boot from those tape images.
That's all.

If you tell me that they're not boot tapes and I haven't to preserve
the tape structure, all this discussion is useless...

But reading the manuals I think that BACKUP is not capable of
a physical tape copy. So I can't create a dd or tapedd/tapecopy like
tape image from backup.

I made a backup of the three DSSI disks starting the 4000 as satellite of
simh and doing BACKUP/IMAGE on a simh virtual HD.
So I thought I could do a similar thing with the tapes.

I can mount and read, obviously, tape content.
The question was how too keep the bootable structure... if one exists...