[ale] SCSI tar problems

[Keith Berger]

I am currently running Linux 2.0-21 with an adaptec 2940 Controller (the
older version) and an HP 4mm tape drive.  When I use tar to pull and put
archives on the tape, it usually works great.  However, I have had some
problems trying to extract a very large tar archive on tape, 600 mb and
5300 files,  I have plenty of free space on a partition mounted in linux
that I am trying to untar it to. If I try and untar the whole tape, it
does about 30 percent and then rewinds and stops.  It does not give any
errors.  It seems to be having trouble with this size of archive.  If I
do a small piece at a time, it seems to work a little better but not
always. For example after finishing the extraction, it kicked me out to
the login prompt and when I tried to log in , it kept putting up the
login prompt.  I have 300 MB of swap and ram setup. (40 mb ram , 260
swap).  I can untar it on in win95 with a SCSI-tar
utility I have.  Is this some sort of memory limitation or file
limitation with tar or my kernel?

			Thanks

				Keith
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