Restore of a Copyutil backup tape

[Randy Richards]

I have a backup tape made with CopyUtil that I would like to restore though I'm presented with a couple hurdles. One is that I do not have a system the I can run CopyUtil and second even if I did I no longer have the Copyutil CD. So I'm looking for another way to unload the data from this backup. Based on some assistance from HP support I've tried using dd to extract the data from the tape to a raw disk but I keep getting I/O errors after 8680 records are written.
I would like to know if first this is possible and second if dd is the right utility to use or should I be using something else.
Thanks

[RickT_1]

Hello Randy,

It sounds like your tape is bad or that and EOF wasn't put on the tape when it was created. Are the first 8680 records looking ok? It could also be your block size.

Rick

[Randy Richards]

Rick,
It appears that data is being read from the tape based on dumping the dd output to a file I was able to browse the contents. The first record or so had the CopyUtil header in it and then lots of binary data. I tried a blocksize of 512 and then 2k but got similar results. I have multiple tapes so I can try another to see if the results are consistent between tapes.
Randy

[RickT_1]

Randy,

You should be able to see gaps in the data if your block size is too high. Then you can adjust it down. I can't remember now if there are single @eof marks for the inter record gaps and then an @eot mark when finished. It's been a really long time since i've had to do this. Hope some of this will help you.

Rick

[melvyn burnard]

I seem to recall these tapes were created with 2 "files"
The first was the boot portion, while the second was a tar style backup ( I think)
Try using mt command to fast forward to the end of the first file, remembering to use the No-Rewind device file.
The see if you can read the contents with the tar or even pax command

Bear in mind Copyutil is a very old uitlity that I am fairly sure is no longer supported.

[Randy Richards]

I thought the tar format came in with Ignite backups. I know I have some Ignite tapes and if I do the following I can read the contents of the tar file:
mt -f /dev/rmt/0mn rew
mt -f /dev/rmt/0mn fsf 1
tar -tvf /dev/rmt/0m

I thought the CopyUtil tapes were a different format, more like a disk image. I was able to dd some of the contents of the CopyUtil tape to a file using the following:
dd if=/dev/rmt/0m of=/mnt/test bs=64k count=5
and I was able to see something that looked like a file structure. See attached file.

[Randy Richards]

I tried to skip the first file on the tape and see if I landed on a tar file,

mt -f /dev/rmt/0mn rew
mt -f /dev/rmt/0mn fsf 1
fsf 1 failed: I/O error

I thought about it for a long time and then error out. I know this works on Ignite tapes. Really unsure of the format of CopyUtil. After lots of googling I've not come across much information on this format. It's promising that I'm seeing some type of file system structure onlined on the dd data I've extracted but not sure what the next step would be to acccess the data.

[Dennis Handly]

Possibly the only way to read unknown tape formats is with a special purpose program that reads very large blocks and then tells you the size of each, so you can find patterns.