Re: Data recovery from corrupted tapes

On Fri, Dec 27, 2002 at 08:56:44AM -0500, Pete Gonzalez wrote:
> I am trying to recover tar archives from from some old TR-3
> backup tapes encoded using the zftape compression.  I issue
> a command like this:
> 
> 	tar xvf /dev/zftape
> 
> It starts extracting files and printing their names to the
> screen, but eventually it stops printing filenames and seems
> to be stuck in an endless loop of rewinding and re-reading
> the same section of tape, apparently because of a "bad sector".

I have lots of old tapes, but none with problems like this. Sometimes
the drive rewinds the tape a bit and the goes on..
The way the drive works, it's probably the firmware that does
the rewinding(just a wild guess).
So try to position the tape a couple of blocks further and try to extract
the rest of the archive to disk or something.

> Are there any settings for this?  Does anyone have experience
> with damaged tapes?

I only have a SCSI DAT tape and afaik there are no settings for this
on my hardware.

-- 

With best regards,

		Boris B.
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