bonnetf@apo.esiee.fr (bonnet-franck) (08/21/90)
Hello, I just came back from holidays (BIARRITZ is a great place for surfing !) and then the reality is back. I have a cartrige generated by tar on a SUN (don't know the type) and it is REALLY impossible to read it with APOLLO's tar,maybe I'm wrong somewhere but I don't know where. Has anyone an idea ? Thanks. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------| bonnetf@apo.esiee.fr | | Frank Bonnet | Surfing ... | E.S.I.E.E | | BP99 93162 Noisy le Grand cedex.FRANCE. | the rest is details ! | Fax : 33 1 45 92 66 99 | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
krowitz@RICHTER.MIT.EDU (David Krowitz) (08/21/90)
Sun's tar cartridge tapes may or may not be physically readable on the Apollo's tape drive. The Apollo drives (including the newer SCSI cartridge tape drives) use the QIC-24 recording format, which puts 60 MB of data on a DC600A cartridge or 45 MB onto a DC300XL/P cartridge. Older Sun-3's had drives which could recording in both the older QIC-11 format and the QIC-24 format. The QIC-11 format is a lower density format which you got when you used the /dev/rst0 device. When you used /dev/rst8, you got the QIC-24 format. QIC-11 tapes are not readable on the Apollo drives. If your tape came from a Sparcstation, the situation is different. The Sparc cartridge tape drives use DC600 series tapes only (the DC300XL/P's won't work), and can handle either the QIC-24 format or a newer, higher density format (maybe QIC-120?) which puts 120 MB onto a DC600A cartridge. Again, the format depends on the device used to write the tape. The Sparcstation tapes are readable *if* they were written in QIC-24 format *and* you are using an SR10 machine to run "tar" (in particular: our DN3500 with the internally mounted SCSI cartridge tape drive running SR10.2 works fine with a simple "/bin/tar xvf /dev/rmts8" -- we've used this before in the recent past. I think our DN560 also worked with "/bin/tar xvf /dev/rct8"). -- David Krowitz krowitz@richter.mit.edu (18.83.0.109) krowitz%richter.mit.edu@eddie.mit.edu krowitz%richter.mit.edu@mitvma.bitnet (in order of decreasing preference)
joey@tessi.UUCP (Joe Pruett) (08/24/90)
There is a lot of confusion about tape formats, so now I'll add to the confusion :-) The newer sun systems can read/write QIC-150 onto DC-6150 tapes which gives 150 megabytes, and they can read QIC-24 on any flavor of DC tape (15-60 meg). Most other suns can read/write QIC-24 and QIC-11 on any DC tape. Both formats are the same density, but QIC-11 isn't as likely to read on foreign systems because of alignment differences. Extremely old sun-2 systems could only read/write QIC-11 and only 4 tracks (QIC-24 is 9 track). Max capacity is around 20meg. I've never had a problem switching tapes between suns and apollos as long as i use QIC-24 format. I've used DC-150 through DC-600 without any problems.