[comp.misc] Tar tape recovery, how?

jbev@iscden.jbsys.com (Jim Bevier - J B Systems) (04/30/91)

I have a wangtek 150mb tape drive running on SCO unix SYS V R2 and backed
up my system prior to doing a low level of my disk.  After formatting, I
restore the system from tape and was on my way.  In trying to restore a
user filesystem, I ran into a tape error on the save tape.  I have tried
everything I know to get past the error to recover the rest of the tape,
but to no avail.  The wangtek drive just retries and retries, until I get
an I/O error.  So....., how can I recover this data?  The tape was a 3M
DC600A.  I have tried several other tape drives, and they can not read
the tape at all.  I think the wangtek recorded the 120mb tape at 150mb
density, which makes it unreadable by other drives.  If you cannot tell
me how to recover the data, is there a place where I can send the tape
to have the data recovered?  The 80mb of data on the tape represents 18
months of hard work on a C compiler, RTL, and assembler.  Along with
other "stuff".  BTW, my other backups of the file system also have an
error!!!!  Any info would be welcome.

Thanks,

Jim Bevier
jbev@jbsys.com

chip@chinacat.Unicom.COM (Chip Rosenthal) (04/30/91)

In article <317@iscden.jbsys.com>
	jbev@iscden.jbsys.com (Jim Bevier - J B Systems) writes:
>So....., how can I recover this data?

Get Henry Spencer's `tarx' posted recently to comp.sources.mumble.
*Everybody* out there who ever uses tar should get a copy of it.  It's
nifty, and it's a good idea to have on hand before you need it.

-- 
Chip Rosenthal  512-482-8260  |
Unicom Systems Development    |    I saw Elvis in my wtmp file.
<chip@chinacat.Unicom.COM>    |

wollman@emily.uvm.edu (Garrett Wollman) (05/04/91)

In article <1970@chinacat.Unicom.COM> chip@chinacat.Unicom.COM (Chip Rosenthal) writes:
>Get Henry Spencer's `tarx' posted recently to comp.sources.mumble.
>*Everybody* out there who ever uses tar should get a copy of it.  It's
>nifty, and it's a good idea to have on hand before you need it.

Not having seen the original posting but...

tarx has one shortcoming.  If you somehow manage to slightly corrupt a
compressed tar file (it was something to do with a bad memory board,
NFS, and a Silicon Graphics Power Server; don't ask), so that the
header is no longer in the right place (and the file is not a multiple
of the block size), tarx will be unable to find it.  I want to fix my
archive, so I will eventually hack up tarx to make it search for a
string known to be in every header (such as my uid), but for now...

-GAWollman


Garrett A. Wollman - wollman@emily.uvm.edu

Disclaimer:  I'm not even sure this represents *my* opinion, never
mind UVM's, EMBA's, EMBA-CF's, or indeed anyone else's.