On Thu, June 14, 2012 09:01, [email protected] wrote: > A colleague has got some LTO4 tapes, which are believed to be written > using a tar command with a switch of -b 1024. > > However, we tried tar -b 1024 -tvf /dev/nst0 > > we are getting io errors. > > We put in a blank LTO4 tape, and with that, a simple tar -cvf /dev/nst0 > followed by tar -xvf /dev/nst0 works. > > So we cannot make out why we cannot read the LTO4 tapes.
Are you sure the tape was written with 1024-byte blocks? First make sure you're not in fixed-block mode by doing mt -f /dev/nst0 setblk 0 Then try reading with dd. As mentioned you could pipe dd's output into tar, or just dump the file to disk first. Try dd if=/dev/nst0 of=data.bin bs=262144 and see what happens. (The large block size dd argument is hopefully larger than whatever block size the tape was actually written with.) -- Mark
