Tape dumping programs for Unix/Linux...

From: Douglas H. Quebbeman <dquebbeman_at_acm.org>
Date: Thu May 2 20:54:02 2002

> At 04:10 PM 5/2/2002 -0400, Douglas H. Quebbeman wrote:
> >No. And I see no useful purpose in including that in the format.
> >If the read was recovered, you have the data; surely you would
> >*not* want to recreate a tape and make a previously marginal
> >block, marginal again on a clone?
>
> Choosing between the loss of all the data, and a partial
> copy, I'll take the partial copy.
>
> I have many 8-inch disks with bad blocks. I'd like to preserve
> the data if at all possible. A simplistic 'dd'-style read
> won't preserve everything; it'll bail out when it has a problem.

???

I just did a 'dd' of a bad QIC-80 tape; it read the entire tape
as a single file, and didn't bail out.

I've not done that with magtape, but ISTR someone else here
saying that 'dd' does raw reads, bad blocks and all...

My bad if not true.

-dq
Received on Thu May 02 2002 - 20:54:02 BST