Unknown Tape Data 1

[montazuma]

I've got a tape drive hooked up to my machine and I'm trying to read some data that was backed up on a tape ~10 years ago.

The problem is that who ever wrote the tape, didn't record the blocksize or any of the filenames of the data on the tape.

How can I get access to the data and download it onto my computer without knowing this information?

Thanks a lot for helping out!

 

[miblo]

tar -tvf /dev/rmt0 ?

 

[montazuma]

That command told me the blocksize on the tape was 2.

No joke, 2.

Doesn't that seem a tad bit small?

 

[Salem]

> That command told me the blocksize on the tape was 2.
In hex, this would be 0x0002

If you reverse the pair of bytes (say for example the tape was written with a different endian machine), it would read 0x0200.

This equates to a more reasonable block size of 512 bytes.

Before you do anything experimental, make sure the tape is read-only

Which version of unix/linux are you using?
Which version of tar are you using?
For example, GNU tar has a [/code]--old-archive[/code] flag which may be of some help.

Also, what about

http://www.google.com/search?q=tape+recovery

--

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

 

[KenCunningham]

Salem, a star for the 'different endian' comment!