[plug] mounting a tape drive

[Andrew J. Barbara]

What is the backup software? Is it just a tar command in a script? Or is
it something like Tapeware?
Andrew

-----Original Message-----
From: Jon L. Miller [mailto:jlmiller at mmtnetworks.com.au] 
Sent: Monday, 15 July 2002 5:04 PM
To: plug at plug.linux.org.au
Subject: Re: [plug] mounting a tape drive

Results of commands:
# tar xvzf /dev/hdd
tar (child): /dev/hdd: Cannot read: Input/output error
tar (child): At beginning of tape, quitting now
tar (child): Error is not recoverable: exiting now

gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

Question when I did a listing from the application that does the backup
I was able to see all the files, at the same time I could hear the tape
drive being accessed to produce the listing.
Just curious why would I be getting some of these errors?

jlm
  

On Mon, 2002-07-15 at 07:54, Craig Ringer wrote:
> 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
> GPG Key Fingerprint: AF1C ABFE 7E64 E9C8 FC27  C16E D3CE CDC0 0E93
380D
> 	-- if it ain't broke, add features 'till it is. (or:)
> 	while (! broken) { features ++ ; broken = isBroken(features) }
> 
> 
>