2 Mar
2005
2 Mar
'05
11:33 a.m.
On Wed, 2005-03-02 at 09:48 -0800, Al Kossow wrote:
Next question - anyone think of a good reason why a lot of old tapes I
have containing tar archives seem to hit read errors at around 7.8MB
into the tape?
That is the first time the tape reverses direction.
Ahh - interesting!
You should always 'retension' the tape before
trying to read it
mt -f /dev/st0 retension works under most unix systems.
This runs the tape out, and rewinds to BOT.
Hmm, that works, but doesn't seem to help in this case as far as
reading's concerned (tried with both rewinding and non-rewinding
devices). I wonder if there is some incompatibility when reading 60MB
tapes in a 150MB device.
I've certainly got a native 60MB SCSI QIC unit in my Tek that I should
try, assuming I haven't got one already sitting on the shelf where I
keep spare hard drives and floppy drives...
Possible it's also a Linux oddity with the tape subsystem I suppose.
Blocking factor doesn't seem relevant as the unit's reading *something*.
I'll see if I can find jumper settings for this 150MB drive too, just in
case there's a "work with 60meg tapes" jumper missing ;)
cheers
J.