From: vikram sachdeva (vikram_dude@softhome.net)
Date: Sat Jul 13 2002 - 02:42:04 EDT
Hello
I got tons of responses from so many people. Thanks to
Gavin Kreuiter,
Alan Nabeth,
Robert M Lang,
Selden E Ball,
Steve Herber ,
James ,Bob ,
Lucio,Joerg, and
Oisin .
Most of them suggested to take a dump of tape to HDD and then use file
command to see the what info it gives.Some even suggested to use VMS
dump utility to find the format in which backup is taken. Some even
suggested that backup might be taken by fbackup (HP-UX )
I am including some of the reply which I consider very good.
======================
Joerg wrote
As you copied the contents to disk, I propose a "od -xc | head"
of that disk file. Typically, some header information of "tar"
or "cpio" might show up there; you might then read about the
"file" command and its way of determining formats (it uses a list
"/etc/magic"). When doing that check manually, consider the
byte swap difference.
If that fails, I propose you ask on some HP mailing list, and
provide the "od -xc | head" output there - they might discover
some format specific to HP.
======================
Alan Nabeth wrote
I have read of programs that know about a large number of
tape formats and will guess at the format by reading the
first few tape blocks. If you can find one that runs on
Tru64 UNIX that would be one way to guess at the format.
Whether you have what you need to restore is another
matter.
One thing you should do is not to make any assumptions about
the original block size. That's information about the format.
Most Tru64 UNIX need to know the block size used to write the
tape if is different than their default (tar, cpio probably
use 10 KB, vdump uses 60 KB, etc). You may be able to use
vdump to guess at the block size. Have it read only one
record using a very large block size (multiple megabytes).
Don't use the "conv=sync" option. The size of the resulting
file should be block size (*).
Once you know the transfer size, you can try the usual
commands with their options to accept non-default block
sizes to see if it is one of the common formats. Beyond
that use od(1) to look at the first block and see if
that provides a hint.
(*) I verified this with a 10 KB block size tar tape on
V4.0G, using a bs=1024k dd(1) transfer size option.
======================
Regards
Vikram Sachdeva
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