End of tape

[Scott Painter_1]

I got a message stating end of tape when trying to tar a bunch of files. What does that mean? Did it finish or is there a size restraint on tar files or something? It doesn't look like all the files I wanted to tar up were put in there because it stopped in the I's of my data.

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

End-oftape usually *is* the physical end of tape. full-stop.

The tape has a little hole at the end to mark this. Realy phisical.

How can 40 Gig of data not fir on a 40 gig tape? Well, it is a device. It writes a block with size x then marks it with en end-of-block and writes the next block. The smaller the blocks, the (relative) more eor markers are put, which also consume tape space.

If you write huge blocks (say 204800 blocks) there are relative less markers, and relative more data blocks, meaning that you can use effectively more of the theoretically 40 gig available

HTH

[S.K. Chan]

If you look at the man page for tar it mentioned about the fact that .."tar does not support the archival of files larger than 2GB or files that have user/group IDs greater than 60K..."
I'm thinking maybe you have files that are more than 2GB. In a tar-to-tape scenario the "end of tape" error usually means the tape is not compatible with the drive. I have encounter a situation whereby I tried to create a tar-ball (well within tar limit) and it stopped at the same file every time with "end of tape" error. Later I discovered that the file was corruppted because it could not be opened by the application that was used to create it. Another possible reason in a tar-ball creation situation is you got hardware error (bad disk, bad sector on disk, etc) and that could give the "end of tape" error as well when tar is finding difficulty reading/writing.

[harry d brown jr]

You hit the end of tape. What kind of tape drive are you using, and size of tape, plus how much data are you attempting to place on the tape?


Try the GNU tar program, ported by HP, if you do it, install it in this order:

http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Gnu/gzip-1.3.3/

http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Development/Libraries/libiconv-1.8/

http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Gnu/gettext-0.11.2/

http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Gnu/tar-1.13.25/


live free or die
harry

[Scott Painter_1]

I think that the size might be the problem, but I've never ran into that before (haven't been doing this for long though). I'm not trying to write to a tape, I'm just trying to create a tar file of a bunch of files that were written out as a SDRC package file (if anybody is familiar with that). I've done it before with no problem. Would it help to have the exact message? I can try to tar it again and copy the error message here.

[Scott Painter_1]

Here's the command I used and the message returned:

tar cvf 16jun02.tar *

Tar: end of tape
Tar: to coninue, enter device/file name when ready or null string to quit

What next?

[John Carr_2]

Scott

the command syntax is fine you probably have a problem with files.

what to check

ls -la * ( files greater than 2GB)

du -s ( disk usage of dir )

bdf ( for free space in file system)

good luck
John.

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

Your problem is that you instruct tar to include the archive itself into the archive. The archive is open and cannot be put into the archive itself. Hence the message. If you ar not in root, choose another directory, let's say ..

rm 16jun02.tar
tar cvf ../16jun02.tar *

or make your pattern to exclude the tar file. Or better, use gnu tar (link already posted) and an index

echo index >index
find * -type f >>index
GNUtar -cvf 16jun02.tar -T index