[ale] DAT Tape Data Recovery

[Jonathan Glass]

I'm going to try the dd trick next.

The backup was performed on an SGI Onyx box back in 1998.  The
researcher is going to lookup the grad student's email address, and ask
how he did the backup.  I'm not sure what type of tape drives were on
the Onyx boxes, but am Google'ng like made to find out.

Thanks

jonathan

On Wed, 2003-05-28 at 11:06, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> Hmm. Is it possible to dd from a tape device? That would give an output
> file hat "file" can be run on to see what type of structure it is. Plus
> it would make a copy of it.
> 
> Are you sure that the system that made that tape was a unix system? I've
> run into several windows backup tape that are useless with out the
> backup software. Sometimes it has been version specific.
> 
> On Wed, 2003-05-28 at 10:52, Jonathan Glass wrote:
> > Good morning.
> > 
> > A researcher walked in this morning and handed me a Fuji Film "DG-90MAA"
> > (90Meter tape) and wants the data off of it.  I've tried tar, cpio,
> > dump/restore.  Any suggestions on what else to try?  I always backup
> > using tar, so my cpio and restore syntax may be wrong, but the fact that
> > I'm getting tape read errors from all three commands makes me nervous.
> > 
> > TIA
> > 
> > mt recognizes the tape:
> > 
> > # mt status
> > SCSI 2 tape drive:
> > File number=0, block number=0, partition=0.
> > Tape block size 512 bytes. Density code 0x13 (DDS (61000 bpi)).
> > Soft error count since last status=0
> > General status bits on (45010000):
> >  BOT WR_PROT ONLINE IM_REP_EN
> > 
> > But tar craps out:
> > 
> > # tar -tvf /dev/st0
> > tar: /dev/st0: Cannot read: Input/output error
> > tar: At beginning of tape, quitting now
> > tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
> > 
> > So does restore:
> > 
> > # restore rf /dev/st0
> > restore: Tape read error on first record
> > 
> > And cpio craps out, too.
> > # cpio  -i  -v  -C  32768  -d  -u  -m  -I  /dev/st0  "*"
> > cpio: read error: Input/output error
-- 
Jonathan Glass <jonathan.glass at ibb.gatech.edu>

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