Copying Tapes Question

[Vito Sarducci]

I am copying a PRIMOS 8mm tape to my 4mm DAT format for use on my HP and Digital Servers.

Does anyone know the blocksize to use for tcopy or dd from the PRIMOS uses?

Please advise?

Vito

[Volker Borowski]

Hi Vito,

I would assume that depends on the application that wrote to the 8mm tape.

If it was a standard tar, you should read and write with 5120 byte, same with cpio -ovB.

Hope this helps
Volker

[Vito Sarducci]

It was written from PRIMOS under whatever PRIMOS blocksizing was default standdard back then.

Im thinking that if someone here has dealt with the standard backup process for PRIMOS many moons ago, they can shed some light on this subject.

There is a utility out there called magrst that can read from PRIMOS. Its a unix tool that costs 3k to get.

Does anyone know of any other tool out there that can do this?

Please advise?

Vito

[Kirk Gardner]

Prime tapes are usually written with MAGSAV and the format varies with PrimOS revision level. MAGSAV is a bugger to work with because it is variable record size within variable block size however both UniVerse and UniData have programs which understand the format and can read it direct from tape.

Some Prime sites did use another utility called BRMS (backup and restore management system IIRC, but more well known as 'better remember magsav').