MightyFrame cpio demystified

I personally find cpio very confusing, and I hear that I'm not alone.

When working with the UNIX PC previously in this endeavor,  I abandoned trying, because someone had provided a working version of tar for the 3b1 (MC68010 processor).

However, when I started this post, I couldn't find the equivalent for the MightyFrame MC68020 processor.  I thought that now I must break down and learn how to use cpio.  Since then, Tom has pointed out that it is actually there, at /usr/bin/tar.  But, I found other reasons that I need cpio, such as copying an entire file/directory structure.  So, here is my analysis, such that it is:

MightyFrame: Creating A Boot Tape

First, write the VHB with bootloader, as shown in an earlier post:

sudo dd if=vhb.miti.tape.slice1.dd of=/dev/nst0 

The "nst0" tells the tape not to rewind after writing each file, or something like that.

(Note that this is on modern Linux using a Tandberg TDC-3620 with SCSI card)

Then, add the CTIX kernel after that.  We had to "adjust" the length of this file by padding the end with sets of null bytes (Hex Value 00) until the file reached exactly 396 blocks, otherwise, we got an error saying that 395+1 blocks read, 395+0 blocks written, or to that effect.