25 Jan
2017
25 Jan
'17
4:07 p.m.
On Wed, 25 Jan 2017, Eric Smith wrote:
ISTR being able to successfully do `mt fsr' after `mt eod' with a DDS-4
drive and `mt tell' returned sensible status afterwards, so chances are it
might work. It might depend however on the particular drive, OS and
version of `mt' as there seem to be several implementations around; maybe
also whether firmware-driven data compression has been used. Plus my
memory may be fooling me as it's been years since. I think it's surely
worth trying though, as there's nothing to lose.
Maciej
The problem:
They then accidentally overwrote the start of the tape yesterday
with about 1 KB of data, plus EOT.
I hope someone can prove me wrong, but I think that short of a major effort
to hack the drive firmware, the data is gone. Modern tape drives are "too
smart" to allow reading past logical EOT, and the tape format is too
complex to allow fooling the firmware by any simple means.