And I'm not even using 2.11 or any type of BSD. Sun, Sco, Windows or Dos based is all I can read and write 9 track tapes with. Used sun (since compress essentially compiled out of the tarball). Used dd with the different bs settings. Don't blame Michael for his stance though. There are only so many things he can support. I hope these work for John Willis, but I'm not making any promises either. Just trying to help out when and where I can. I've got a 9-track drive and a bunch of tapes to recycle. If it doesn't work, John will have to see if someone else can create the tapes he needs. Either way, working or not, he's more than welcome to try. Keep the tapes and pass em around until you get a working copy if what I did doesn't work. For what it's worth, I read and convert different _DATA_ tapes almost daily. Labelled, unlabelled, ascii, ebcdic, variable length, fixed length, etc. I essentially treated these as unlabled data tapes. I did read the tar files back off onto sco and DOS and was able to "untar" them. diff showed the write files and read files to be the same on both platforms. Hope it all works. -----Original Message----- From: Fred N. van Kempen [mailto:Fred.van.Kempen@microwalt.nl] Sent: Friday, January 24, 2003 7:13 PM To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org Subject: RE: Quasijarus 4.3BSD on 1600bpi magtape This is bullshit, Michael. "maketape" does exactly the same, namely, creating tape files with a certain blocksize, separated by tape marks. C'mon. --fred