Problems with a munged tar tape

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  I have a 6250 bpi tar tape containing about 50MB of files. (About 5 years
worth of college stuff.) Unfortunately, it seems that someone trying to read
it in from me munged the header as every time I read it, I get an EOF
immediately and no amount of effort can get past it. Also, the tape now seems
to think it's a 1600 bpi tape and not a 6250 bpi tape. I've tried using dd to
get past it, and I've tried using combinations of fseek, lseek, read, et all.
No luck. Only thing I've not tried is physically cutting the header off and
seeing what happens. As that is rather final, I'd like to know if there are
any other things I could try. Are there any services out there that recover
munged tapes?

-David Kovar