Restore in hp dds-4 Tape.

[Damián Sarmiento]

Hi,
Could you help me please with the following:
I've just attached a hp dds-4 [C5718A] data cartridge at my HP-UX server in order to do a full backup.
Running "mt -t /dev/rmt/1mn status", I got:

# mt -t /dev/rmt/1mn status
Drive: HP C5683A
Format:
Status: [41112600] BOT online compression immediate-report-mode
File: 0
Block: 0
# mt -t /dev/rmt/1mn fsf 1
# restore tbfy 32 /dev/rmt/1mn
Tape is not a dump tape

What does it mean? "[Tape is not a dump tape]"
I wish to restore the data of that cartridge.

What is wrong?
My OS is HP-UX B.11.31 U ia64

Thank you in advance,
DASM

[melvyn burnard]

so what command was used to create a backup on that tape?

[Damián Sarmiento]

Hi melvyn.

I didn´t make the backup.
Is there any way to know the commmand that someone typed?

Thanks.

[Patrick Wallek]

>>Is there any way to know the commmand that someone typed?

Ask them?

[Damián Sarmiento]

There is nobody to ask.
is there any way?

[Patrick Wallek]

Where did you get the tape? When was it created? On what type of system? Is there anything on the tape tape itself (written on a label)?

[melvyn burnard]

well that is not going to be easy.
Sometimes you might find using dd to write a part of the tape contents to a file on disk, and then running the "file" command MAY say it is a cpio or tar archive, but not always

[Bill Hassell]

> There is nobody to ask.

Wow, and nobody put a label on the tape to describe the contents? Did someone give you the restore commands to use, or was this just a guess? The mt command looks a bit strange. It says to position the tape past the first file. Do you know why?

[Damián Sarmiento]

Thanks melvyn burnard and everybody.

Finally I found the right command and it is frecover.

Running:
# frecover -f /dev/rmt/1m -x -N -v
I get the list of files in the tape.
So, I typed:
# frecover -f /dev/rmt/1m -r -v

and the files was extracted.

That´s the problem when the tape has not label or nobody can tell you the command that used to make the backup.

Regards.

[Bill Hassell]

> frecover -f /dev/rmt/1m -x -N -v

While this works, it is the slowest possible way to read the table of contents. This is the command to get the table of contents in just a few seconds:

frecover -I - -f /dev/rmt/1m

Note that the mt__fsf command is just a waste of time with frecover. No matter where the tape is positioned, frecover rewinds it before starting.