tar tvf gives a checksum error

[Bala Ganeshan]

Hi Folks,
tar tvf gives the following error:
Tar: blocksize = 2
directory checksum error


Any idea what this means and how to resolve this? Thanks for your time and patience.
Regards,
BG.

[G. Vrijhoeven]

Hi Bala,

I am afraid you have a bad tape...
however the blocksize = 2 is strange to me tar usally uses a blocksize of 512k....
The -b flag allows you to specify alternate blocksizes.

Regards,

Gideon

[HGN]

Hi

This looks like a bad media issue, maybe you wnat to try taking a backup on another media and restore.

Rgds

HGN

[Bill Hassell]

Since you didn't get an I/O error message like errno 5, this is more likely a recording mistake, probably a different program like cpio or dump or fbackup was used to create the tape. Or worse, the tape was left in the drive after the backup and someone accidently cat'ed or dd'ed a file to the tape. If you have the option, take the tape back to the original system and see if the backup utility used can read the tape.

[Devesh Pant_1]

I would suggest using another tape for a test restore and also check how the backup was done ( blocking factor used ? ) and then trying the -b option

[Sanjay Shashikant Joshi]

Hi,

Even I got a same error like this.

Tar: blocksize = 10
directory checksum error

The solutions to this issue is to use cpio command instead of tar.

cpio -cvBuild < /dev/rmt/4m
cpio -idmv < /dev/rmt/4m

This is solved my problem. :)

[OldSchool]

"
Even I got a same error like this.

Tar: blocksize = 10
directory checksum error

The solutions to this issue is to use cpio command instead of tar.

cpio -cvBuild < /dev/rmt/4m
cpio -idmv < /dev/rmt/4m

This is solved my problem. :) "

1) you realize this thread is way old...
2) the solution you found simply indicates that the tape you had wasn't a tar tape to begin with....

[V. Nyga]

Hi,

try this:
'dd if=/dev/rmt0 bs=1024k|tar xvf -'
I use this command to read tapes from sgi.
Or copy it with 'dd' and try to read it with winzip.

Volkmar