Pertec Tape Drive Interface Musings

[Al Kossow]

On 6/10/15 8:40 AM, Dennis Boone wrote:
>   > > Using dd to read tapes to disk discards the block size information.
>
>   > And that is precisely why I'm thinking of an ad-hoc interface rather
>   > than just plugging a SCSI drive into a UNIX box.
>
> It's eminently possible to image tapes sanely on a unix box.  See e.g.:
>
> http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/software/tapeutils/
>
> The main limitation seems to be that it's hard to get the (broken) data
> from a block that had a read error when using SCSI hardware.  There's
> probably a way around this if one digs into lower layers of SCSI magic;
> I haven't gone looking.
>
> De
>
>

I need to figure out why this program also doesn't deal with tape errors well.
If you get an error, it will go into an endless loop creating -1 byte records.