Re: Reading Symbolics tapes on UNIX

Hello 'bear',

Thank you very much for the script. I don't have my Sparc20 running at
the moment so I will try it at my Linux box. I already produced there
some images but when I wrote them back to another qic tape these were
not readable on my Symbolics 3640. I'm very happy about your mail since
I did'nt thought about the different byte ordering. I might then be
able to write these images back to tape and get readable tapes for
Genera.

Cheers,

Marc






r. 'bear' stricklin schrieb:
> On Thu, 23 Jan 2003, r. 'bear' stricklin wrote:
> 
> > I wrote a bourne shell script to make an 'image' of a
> QIC tape, so that it
> > could be regenerated in the event of a media failure. I
> will send it to
> > you this evening, when I am at home.
> 
> This script works with Solaris, and can be easily
> modified to work on
> Linux or other unix systems. It will create one file in
> the filesystem for
> each tape file read off the tape, in the order they are
> read. It's not
> particularly robust, but if there are no errors on the
> tape, it gets the
> job done. Generalizing how to handle tapes with read
> errors was not a
> project I felt up to tackling when I threw the script
> together.
> 
> If your tape is byte-backward with respect to the
> platform you are reading
> (like IRIX tapes are with respect to Solaris tapes),
> touch a file in the
> current directory called 'byte-swap'. Symbolics tapes are
> in the same byte
> order as Solaris tapes, by the way.
> 
> To image a QIC in tape drive 3 on a Solaris box, run
> 
> 	tapeimage 3
> 
> FWIW I use this script on my SPARCstation 20 to bulk
> image up to 7 QIC
> tapes at a time. The machine could likely handle more,
> but that's as many
> drives as I have. I handle errors by hand, with multiple
> reads and a
> similar but slightly modified process. I do this a lot,
> so if you run into
> trouble, feel free to contact me.
> 
> 
> #! /bin/sh
> 
> PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin
> BASE=/dev/rmt/                 # change depending on your
> system's tape
>                                # device path
> 
> if [ ! "$1" ] ; then
> 	echo "Usage: `basename $0` tape-device"
> 	exit 1
> fi
> 
> if [ -f "./byte-swap" ] ; then
> 	swap="conv=swab"
> fi
> 
> mt -f $BASE$1 ret
> 
> i=1
> while `dd if=$BASE${1}n of=temp $swap` ; do
> 	mv temp file.`date -u '+%Y%m%d.%T`.$y
> 	y=`echo $y "+1" | bc`
> done
> 
> # end of script
> 
> 
> Good luck.
> 
> ok
> r.
> 
> 
>