Hello,

I am using Solaris 7 to read in a bunch of Exabyte 8mm tapes that were
written with tar. The hardware is a SPARCstation 10 with an Exabyte
8500 drive.

I had successfully restored many of the tapes, but then came across
one that appears to have been written with a variable block size (I
believe it came from an SGI system). The Solaris 7 tar was unable to
read that tape, and produced the error "tar: blocksize = 0".

Now, I am unable to read any of the other tapes either (even the ones
that read OK before)! I always get the same message: "tar: blocksize =
0".

I have rebooted, powered down, disconnected and reconnected the drive,
etc. but I keep getting the same error message!

Is is possible that the Exabyte tape drive has been put into some mode
where it expects a certain block size? Could the Solaris tape driver
have been put into some mode? If so, how do I restore the original
block size that worked before? Other UNIX/Linux systems seem to have
options to the mt command called 'setblk' or 'defblksize', but these
don't work in Solaris 7. Is there anyway to restore the tape drive
settings to the original default configuration that worked before?

Thanks for any tips or pointers,

--RM

In article <1b39801c.0407310739.4bdb3693@posting.google.com >,
rmercer@byke.com (Merc) wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I am using Solaris 7 to read in a bunch of Exabyte 8mm tapes that were
> written with tar. The hardware is a SPARCstation 10 with an Exabyte
> 8500 drive.
>
> I had successfully restored many of the tapes, but then came across
> one that appears to have been written with a variable block size (I
> believe it came from an SGI system). The Solaris 7 tar was unable to
> read that tape, and produced the error "tar: blocksize = 0".
>
> Now, I am unable to read any of the other tapes either (even the ones
> that read OK before)! I always get the same message: "tar: blocksize =
> 0".
>
> I have rebooted, powered down, disconnected and reconnected the drive,
> etc. but I keep getting the same error message!
>
> Is is possible that the Exabyte tape drive has been put into some mode
> where it expects a certain block size? Could the Solaris tape driver
> have been put into some mode? If so, how do I restore the original
> block size that worked before? Other UNIX/Linux systems seem to have
> options to the mt command called 'setblk' or 'defblksize', but these
> don't work in Solaris 7. Is there anyway to restore the tape drive
> settings to the original default configuration that worked before?
>
> Thanks for any tips or pointers,
>
> --RM

Can you read the tapes with GNU tar or star?

--
DeeDee, don't press that button! DeeDee! NO! Dee...

On Sat, 31 Jul 2004 10:42:00 -0700, "Michael Vilain <vilain wrote:
> In article <1b39801c.0407310739.4bdb3693@posting.google.com >,
> rmercer@byke.com (Merc) wrote:
>> I am using Solaris 7 to read in a bunch of Exabyte 8mm tapes...
>> ...unable to read that tape, and produced...error "tar: blocksize = 0".
>>
>> Now, I am unable to read any of the other tapes either (even the ones
>> that read OK before)! I always get the same message: "tar: blocksize =
>> 0".
>>
>> I have rebooted, powered down, disconnected and reconnected the drive,
>> etc. but I keep getting the same error message!
>>
>> Is is possible that the Exabyte tape drive has been put into some mode
>> where it expects... restore the tape drive settings to the original
>> default configuration that worked before?
>
> Can you read the tapes with GNU tar or star?

I find "tcopy" to be useful in this kind of situation. If you give tcopy
only 1 argument (i.e. the source) it will scan the entire tape and list
out the files and their blocksizes. Then you can specify those block sizes
to tar to read the appropriate file(s). I guess the tape drive has
"remembered" the last blocksize that was used. You need to specify another.

--
Juhan Leemet
Logicognosis, Inc.