Tape dumping programs for Unix/Linux..

From: Raymond Moyers <rmoyers_at_nop.org>
Date: Thu May 2 15:27:33 2002

On Thursday 02 May 2002 14:51, you wrote:
> > At the portion of the work where you just want to get the stuff
> > spooled to a file, you dont care about "block size" yet, you
> > just need to get it pulled off.
> >
> > Unix will treat any device as a stream of bytes
>
> And therein lies the problem.

 You would rather work the drive to death ?
 You know, any really old tape you are attempting to recover
 you really do not want to be running it thru the tape deck
 very much

 disks are huge these days, and the content is best messaged
 on a new disk rather than an old tape.

> > Do you see what im getting at here ? hello ?
>
> No, I don't, because your entire example was disk-centric,

 Wrong i used it as an example, the raw stream already fit
 its intended destination in the hard drive case.
 spools off a cdrom in the wanted configuration in the cdrom
 case, and best fiddled with on disk in the old-tape case.

> which simply doesn't apply to tapes.

Yes it does

> Tell you what... how about an empirical test?

 Well since we already know the behavior, we already know
 the results dont we ?

> Go buy a 9-track drive and hang it on your *nix box.
> Let me send you a 9-track tape. You read it any way
> you want. You send me the tape back.

> Then you go get a second tape, and put the data back on
> any way you want. Then send it to me, and I'll tell you
> if your technique works or not.

 this is very predicatble if you know the raw behavior
 of the devices isnt it

 the whole idea was to point out some of this raw behavior
 
 Raymond
Received on Thu May 02 2002 - 15:27:33 BST