pjb@tcom.stc.co.uk (Peter J. Bishop) (05/29/91)
Before you all start screaming I've already tried using the tar_aids programs from volume7 of the comp.sources.unix archive! Now I've got that out of the way here is the proplem. I had a tar format tape with a large number of files on it. By mistake I used "tar c ..." instead of "tar x ..." to read some of the files off of the tape. As "..." didn't exist I received the message "tar: No such file or directory". Unfortunately tar still overwrote the beginning of my archive tape with a blank tar header. What I need to do is to recover the other, untouched files from off of the tape. This should simply be a matter of: skipping past the new header and the EOT marker using dd to read the rest of the tape into a file modifying the file to clear the data up to the next tar header extracting the data from the file with tar But as I am writing this message it is obvious to you that this doesn't work. When I run dd the same piece of tape is read and re-read over and over again until I finally get an I/O error. The tarl and targ commands from the tar_aids package give the same result. Using "mt fsr ?" to move further into the tape has no effect upon the result. So, now that I have run out of things to try I turn to the readers of this newsgroup for assistance. Firstly does anyone know where I am going wrong and how I can get my files off the tape or secondly does anyone have a program which will simply output anything which it finds on the tape without trying to see if the blocksizes are correct? Please send you responses via mail and I will summarize any help I recive in a later article. -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Bishop. <pjb@tcom.stc.co.uk> BNR Europe, Engineering Services, Tintern House, Llantarnam Park, Cwmbran, GWENT Phone: +44 633 838385 x214 --- Fax: +44 633 876962