topic Having trouble copying data from foreign tape format in Operating System - OpenVMS

Having trouble copying data from foreign tape format

Joe Profaizer — Fri, 25 Jul 2003 12:21:20 GMT

I have a 3490E tape drive connected to my Alpha 4100 running OpenVMS 7.2-1. I'm trying to copy data from a 3480 tape, but cannot for the life of me do it.
I've tried:
$mount/foreign/nolabel $1$mua3:
$mount/over=id $1$mua3:
It mounts the tape, but I can't read/copy any data.

And a few other mount options, but when I try to copy from the media it will not work. Any other mount options or advice I can try?

Thanks,

..Joe

Re: Having trouble copying data from foreign tape format

Huc_1 — Sat, 26 Jul 2003 07:59:09 GMT

Hello

After your mount/over=id $1$mua3
what does "show dev $1$mua3: /full" replies ?
and if you can try it on a other system, is there something on that tape ? ... perhaps its empty?

after it is mounted/over=id
try dump $1$mua3:

... any luck ?
does show error before and after mount increase

Please note I do not have a vms system in front of me, this is just the first thing that I can thing of, I realise you may have already tried all of this, but perhaps if you give us a littel more information someone (perhaps me) will be able to help you futher.

Whatever, enjoy life.

Re: Having trouble copying data from foreign tape format

Jeff Chisholm — Sun, 27 Jul 2003 01:59:02 GMT

Joe,
When you say it will not work, what do you mean exactly?

I used to read tapes from ibm systems in a former life, but it's been a long time. In standard ANSI format, there's a tape label, tape marks, volume label, another tape mark, to get through before you get any data. Do you have a format of what the tape is supposed to look like?

Try mounting it /over=id, and then do about six reads into records, rec1, rec2, rec3, etc. Don't use on_error because that will be triggered by the tape marks.

Once you get past the header and volume info, rec6 should be data, can you try this out?
/jeff

Re: Having trouble copying data from foreign tape format

Burkart Beat — Mon, 28 Jul 2003 07:35:50 GMT

Hi Joe

Do you have any idea about blocksize of that tape?

Maybe you should try the following:

$ mount/ov:id/block=512

512 Byte or any other value, depending of the true recordsize. I used to have tapes with 650 bytes fixed length years ago, from IBM hosts.

In addition to that, it was EBCDIC

To convert this, there is a system call:

lib$tra_ebc_asc(ebcdic value,ascii value)

There is also a nice tool called EXCHANGE

Do $ help exchange

This tool might help too

Best regards
Beat

Re: Having trouble copying data from foreign tape format

Mac Lilley — Mon, 04 Aug 2003 12:01:33 GMT

Hello Joe
ETAPE on the OpenVMS Freeware cd may be useful to you. According to the abstract it will (amongst other things) read EBCDIC tapes.
Regards
ML