Looking to read past EOT on DDS/DLT/LTO

[Maciej W. Rozycki]

On Wed, 25 Jan 2017, Eric Smith wrote:

> > 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.

 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