topic Re: can't read Solaris GNU tar tape on RedHat in Operating System - Linux

can't read Solaris GNU tar tape on RedHat

Doug Kratky — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 16:49:06 GMT

A tar tape was written on Solaris (SPARC) using gnu tar and shipped to us.

We can't read it on RedHat RHEL 3.0 on HPQ 525 (AMD 64). We are using exactly the same tape drive to try to read it. We've tried different blocking factors.

Any ideas on how we can try reading this tape? Anything that should be different on how this tape is written? Any reason why this souldn't work (transporting tape from Solaris to RedHat on AMD)?

Thanks,
Doug

Re: can't read Solaris GNU tar tape on RedHat

Stuart Browne — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 18:50:25 GMT

What commands are you using, and what errors are you seeing?

I know that reading a tape back on Linux can sometimes be problematic (ejecting at the wrong time, not leaving the tape at the right file marker sometimes) compared to the more commercial unicies, but with a bit of fiddling (usually involving 'dd') it should be ok.

Just as an idea, stick the tape in, rewind it, dd off the first 100kb, and see what 'file' makes of the datastream (i.e. 'dd if=/dev/st0 bs=10240 count=10 | file -'). If it doesn't say some sort of tar archive, then you've got issues.

Re: can't read Solaris GNU tar tape on RedHat

Steven E. Protter — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 20:16:34 GMT

What is the exact error code if you run tar txv

SEP

Re: can't read Solaris GNU tar tape on RedHat

Eric van Dijken — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 00:30:29 GMT

You could try to "dd" the tar archive of the tape, using "dd if=/dev/nst0 of=//restore.tar"

This should give you a file on disk. Thats much easier to handle and check.

First you can see if there is really something on the tape. 2nd you can check the file "file //restore.tar" if its really a tar file.

Re: can't read Solaris GNU tar tape on RedHat

C. Beerse_1 — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 04:21:52 GMT

In continuation on the previous `dd` andswer: you can also use `dd` and `tar` in a pipeline:

dd if=/dev/tapedevice | tar xvf -

Where both dd and tar can have their added options to read the tape c.q. stream. This avoids having the tape-image on disk.