Suggestions for Raw Tape Reading Under Linux?

From: William von Hagen <vonhagen_at_vonhagen.org>
Date: Sat May 18 16:16:28 2002

Hi. I've been trying to read in a variety of old backup cartridge tapes
as raw data so that I can write some tools to parse them (or port the
old backup software used to write them). This seems to be the easiest
way to explore old backup data from a variety of old machines without
having to fire up the machines themselves.

Since I'm trying to do this from a Unix (Linux) box, 'dd' was the
obvious first choice, but I don't know things like the block size at
which the tapes were originally written. Ideally, I'd just like to read
raw data from the media, period. I've tried reading the tapes using 'dd'
with a variety of block sizes, but still get zero-length input files.
The drives I'm using to read the data are capabable of the densities at
which they were written, and I understand the Unix/Linux device numbers
- you can hear that the drives are working at the correct density, but
I'm still not getting data. I even wrote a little program to just read
data directly from the raw device, but don't seem to be getting anything
there either.The drives whir and whine, but I get nada.

Any suggestions? Any utilities you'd suggest rather than 'dd'? Many of
these are non-Unix systems, so 'tar' and 'cpio' aren't appropriate.

Thanks!

   Bill
Received on Sat May 18 2002 - 16:16:28 BST