How to clone a boot-able tape

[Platinum]

I used dd command to clone a boot-able tape to another, no error message found, but the command finished so quick the clone was failure.

Can anybody tell me is that right to clone a tape via dd? or how to make it?

[T G Manikandan]

How do I duplicate a tape made with make_recovery?

A tape created with make_recovery contains 2 tape files. The first tape file is written with a 2k block size, and the second with a 10k block size. The first file is a LIF file, and the second is a tar archive.

If you have 2 tape drives on a system, then you can easily duplicate the tapes using 2 dd commands with a no-rewind-on-close device file for the first command. For example:

dd if=/dev/rmt/0mn of=/dev/rmt/1mn bs=2k
dd if=/dev/rmt/0m of=/dev/rmt/1m bs=10k
If you only have 1 tape drive, and have enough disk space to hold the contents of both tape files, then use something like this:

dd if=/dev/rmt/0mn of=/var/tmp/f1 bs=2k
dd if=/dev/rmt/0m of=/var/tmp/f2 bs=10k
(Insert blank tape now)

dd if=/var/tmp/f1 of=/dev/rmt/0mn bs=2k
dd if=/var/tmp/f2 of=/dev/rmt/0m bs=10k