Tape read error - now what ?

[Andreas Israel]

In <mboen.659634062 at peun33> mboen at nixdorf.de (Martin Boening) writes:

>a question about tape archives and tar: what can be done about a tape which
>has a physical error (besides throwing it away)? Is there any way to retrieve
>the data behind the bad block or is it goodbye data?

Some tar versions are able to find the next correct file header if any
header (e.g. the first) is corrupted. At least GNU tar has this ability.

Most UNIX systems have a tape manipulation command (mt on BSD or Ultrix,
tm on Amdahl's UTS, if I recall right).
So you can position the tape behind the corrupted tape block and then
try again.
Only the file with the corrupted tape block is lost :-(
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