| Maybe my memory is way off track (it's a few years since I did anything serious
with Unix and tapes, (and the Federal Charges were dropped :-)), but in my
experience:
- writing a tape with a non-optimal (for the device) block size does nothing
worse than slow down the writes (eg it might prevent the tape device from
'streaming')
- reading a tape with a different block size from that with which it was written
similarly does nothing worse than slow down the reads.
Anything that is completely unable to read a tape on Unix due to block size
differences is doing something very weird; the whole idea of Unix special
devices is to make it easy to do this sort of thing.
If you were using the block (structured) special device, try using the character
(unstructured) device instead, or vice-versa.
Or you could always try the following, which almost seems too na�ve and simple,
but has worked for me in the past:
- a few 'mt' commands as necessary to position at the correct file on tape
- cp /dev/rmt0 /tmp/tapefile (or whatever your tape device is called)
- tar xf /tmp/tapefile (as the tar archive is now on disk, the block size no
longer matters)
Scott
|