How to get past end of cpio archive on tape

[Martin Weitzel]

In article <301 at bria.AIX> mike at bria.AIX (Mike Stefanik/78125) writes:
:>In <1990Dec12.050414.15575 at bjm.wimsey.bc.ca> news at bjm.wimsey.bc.ca (News Login) writes:
:> 
:>I have this backup which I accidentally wrote a cpio archive over.  However
:>the cpio archive is only 20 megabytes and therefore 1/3 of the tape
[...]
:>My question is (drum roll please)
:>how do get past the EOF marker at the end of the cpio?
[...]
:First you have to skip over the first "part" of the tape that you cpio'd to;
:use the no-rewind tape device (ours is rmt4) and do:
:
:	$ dd if=/dev/rmt4 of=/dev/null bs=512k
:
:Then use dd to pull in the last "part" of the tape which is your tar'd files:
:
:	$ dd if=/dev/rmt4 of=/tmp/damaged bs=512k
:

I know this was allready mentioned earlier in this thread, but I think
I should repeat for all those who tuned in late:

ALL THIS IS TECHNICALLY CORRECT BUT BOUND TO FAIL FOR TYPICAL CARTRIDGE
TAPE STREAMERS, SINCE THESE DEVICES PHYSICALLY ERASE ALL OF THE TAPE
WHEN WRITING THE FIRST TRACK!

(IMHO the topic should go into the FAQ.)
-- 
Martin Weitzel, email: martin at mwtech.UUCP, voice: 49-(0)6151-6 56 83