(1) the tape drive: I fixed my IRIS drive by cleaning off the goo and sliding on a section of some sort of (probably very nice & expensive) tubing I got at Boeing Surplus. Not quite vinyl (matte finish and slightly bluish, more flexable then vinyl), but similar. Get a set of calipers in there and get the O.D. and I.D. needed and let me know. I still have many yards of the stuff. (2) Sun tapes are in TAR format, excepting the first couple, Let me grab my "System Administrator's Guide to Sun Workstations". O.K.- for SunOS 4.0 on QIC: tape: file: name: format: 1 0 boot image 1 1 XDRTOC TOC 1 2 copy image 1 3 mini-root image 1 4 munix image 1 5 munixfs image the rest are TARs, except tape1, file 15 (copyright) and tape2, 0 (boot) 2,1 (XDRTOC) and 2,12 (copyright) Have the whole list if anyone needs it, don't want to choke up cctalk, though I archive twice: once as "dd" files, once as "extracted" files. On TAR tapes, the dd files double as the extracted files, so there is no issue (same with CPIO). Things like IRIS-4D disttapes (distcp) and Apollo Domain tapes (rbak) need to be extracted in order to be readable without rewriting a tape, though. Pay attention when copying older tapes. Sometimes the belt slips and you get some slack that starts to make a snapping or popping noise as it gets pulled taut and goes loose. If you don't catch this, you can tie your tape in knots. A script I use to automate the dd copy follows #! /bin/sh filenum=1 #where the numbers in the filenames start bs=1024 #block size, bigger = faster, smaller=better error handling while [1] do dd if=/dev/nrst0 of=file${filenum} bs=${bs} if [$? != 0] then break fi filenum='expr $filenum + 1' done --------- slightly crude, but works. Replace the /dev/nrst0 with your tape no-rewind device (this is set up for SunOS4 as it stands). Make a directory with the name of the tape, cd to it, run the script, and the tapefiles will be extracted in file1, file2 ... files.