Re: Rescueing a DLT tarball on a Mac

From: Maury Markowitz (maury_markowitz_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 11/06/05

  • Next message: Thor Lancelot Simon: "Re: Rescueing a DLT tarball on a Mac" 
    Date: 6 Nov 2005 06:33:59 -0800

    Ok, some progress.

    I was able to install the OS and found the tape drive at nrst0. mt
    worked fine.

    I then tried reading the file using tar and cpio, but both comlained
    that the file format was unknown. So far this isn't so surprising.

    Then I used dd to copy the file off the tape into my home dir. dd
    happily did so, resulting in a suspiciously small 130k file. I am
    curious about dd, exactly what does it do at a low level? Simply copy
    bytes from dev1 to dev2? If so, how does it know when the file ends?

    Anyway cat'ing the result was surprising. The tape had clearly readable
    portions, which suggests that no compression was used on the archive. I
    guess that is good news. However there are several hints that the
    archive is not in a unix format at all, but created using some Mac
    archiver (likely EMC's Retrospect).

    The irony is that I installed the OS on top of a machine that used to
    have Retrospect on it. That said, I tried using Retrospect on the tape
    first (hoping it could read Unix tapes) and it failed.

    *sigh*

    Maury

  • Next message: Thor Lancelot Simon: "Re: Rescueing a DLT tarball on a Mac"
    • Quantcast