[ale] DAT Tape Data Recovery

Jonathan Glass jonathan.glass at ibb.gatech.edu
Fri May 30 12:58:29 EDT 2003


Having spoken with Dow and been given much knowledge and wisdom, and
having heard back from the researcher that he used BRU, and googling to
learn that BRU, MT and DDS drives sometimes disagree with each other an
a tape's block size, I was able to restore the data.

step 1: download bru (looks like a nice program)
step 2: insert tape
step 3: "mt -f /dev/tape setblk 0"
step 4: "bru -tvf /dev/tape " <-file listing
step 5: "bru -Ctvf /dev/tape <dir_name>/*"

Voila! Instant file recovery from a BRU archive created 5+ years ago on
an SGI/IRIX box.

Linux rocks!  Long live the penguin!  :)

Jonathan Glass


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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