hyman@ria.ccs.uwo.ca (Hyman Wong) (06/06/91)
Hello out there in UNIX-land! I need some assistance in the usage of tapes. Specifically, I'm trying to do dumps of disks to a tape, except I want to use the tape for more than one dump. I'm trying to keep an index of all the files dumped so far as the first file on tape, which will be used for restoring any files. The index is pre-allocated on the tape to about 1mb. When I go to use the tape again for another backup, I read in the index, position the tape to the last record, and dump files, adding the filenames and other useful info to the index. Then when the dump is done, I rewind the tape and rewrite the index to the allocated space at the beginning of the tape. Now here's the problem, after rewinding the tape and writing out the index, I get two End-Of-Tape markers after it, to signal the end of the tape. Here's what it looks like: file 1, EOT, EOT, file 2, EOT, file 3, EOT, EOT ~~~~~~~~Yikes! The problem is that I can't seem to read past the first pair of EOT markers, no matter what I try. Is there a way of doing it with mt, dd, or tar? Anyone know of a another way to read past the End-Of-Tape marker pairs? Any suggestions, comments or advice is greatly appreciated. ------------- Hyman Wong (hyman@ria.ccs.uwo.ca) Computing and Communications Services The University of Western Ontario