[plug] mounting a tape drive

[Craig Ringer]

Jon L. Miller wrote:
> Trying to mount a Seagate  STT20000A tape drive. Getting the following
> message in dmesg:
Tapes can't seek randomly, etc and AFAIK linux can't mount them. They're 
linear data storage w/o random seek capabilites, just not workable for 
traditional filesystems.

> ide-tape: hdd <-> ht0: 1000KBps, 6*54kB buffer, 9720kB pipeline, 110ms
> tDSC, DMA
> ide-tape: Reached idetape_chrdev_open
> ide-tape: Reached idetape_read_position
> ide-tape: Reached idetape_read_position_callback
> ide-tape: hdd: Unsupported command in request queue (0)
> end_request: I/O error, dev 16:40 (hdd), sector 2
> ide-tape: hdd: Unsupported command in request queue (0)
> end_request: I/O error, dev 16:40 (hdd), sector 0
> FAT: unable to read boot sector

> Not sure, but there is a backup done, I cannot get a restore from the
> tape.  So I thought I would mount the device and copy the tar file and
> extract the file I need.  However, I'm not able to mount the drive.

tar tvf /dev/hdd 	(list files)
tar xvf /dev/hdd	(extract all)
tar xvf /dev/hdd [</path/to/files> ... ] (extract select files)

You may need to use tar xvzf etc if the file is gzipped on the tape.

If its not a tar file or is stored weirdly try
dd if=/dev/hdd of=myfile
then "file myfile" to see what kind of data is on the tape.

I've assumed it was written using linux or another unix, and tar. If its 
windows backup, you're in for some fun...

-- 
Craig Ringer
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