Recovering cartridge tape files

[Braham Levy]

In article <6462 at trantor.harris-atd.com>, chuck at pluto.Harris-ATD.com (Chuck Musciano) writes:
> 
>      I have a QIC-24 cartridge tape that had a number of files on it, and
> then had another file written to the tape at the beginning.  This overwrote
> at least one of the files on the tape, of course, but should not have harmed
> the remaining files after that point.
> 
>      How can I recover the remaining files on the tape?  I tried using mt
> and dd to move past EOT and continue reading, but had no luck.  Is there
> some magic sequence of tape ioctl's I can use to skip the first file on
> the tape and then continue reading subsequent files?
> 
>      I am using a QIC-24 SCSI tape drive on a Sun 3/280 running SunOS 4.0.3.
>

if it can be done you'll need to use the non-rewind tape device. usually
this is the same device name but with a digit number higher eg /dev/mt0
and /dev/mt8, see man mt and associated for details on your system. dd
is probably the only way you'll get the stuff off, if you can at all.
the easiest thing to do then is to read the tape with dd twice. if you
want to be clever you can use `mt fsf` command but this mightn't work. 
> -- 
> 
>
braham

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