tape question

[Ben Pfaff]

Mark Szidik - Michigan Library Consortium <szidikm@mlc.lib.mi.us> writes:

> I have a DAT tape from a library that claims there is data on it.  (data
> put on it using proprietary library system running on HPUX).  I cant
> seem to read it.   I have tried using dd and tar and even attempted
> cpio, none of them can do anything with the tape.  This the second time
> they tried to send me the tape, same result.  I think the tape is blank,
> but I thought I would ask the group if they have any other methods to
> try reading this tape.

Do you know that you have the right block size set?  There's a
few different forms of lossage that I know of with respect to
having the block size set wrongly:

	* A block size of 0 (variable) versus one that's nonzero
          (fixed) doesn't work, and might not return a useful
          error message.

	* Some systems use a very large block size; i.e., Irix
          uses a 256KB (262144 byte) block size by default.  The
          last time I had to read one of these tapes on a Linux
          system I had to supply a special parameter to the `st'
          scsi tape kernel module, because otherwise it wasn't
          able to reserve a block of kernel memory big enough.

Other than that, I'd try `cat' as well, i.e., something like
this:
	cat /dev/st0 > foo

Good luck.

Ben