[1254] in linux-scsi channel archive
req for help ftape/scsi tape
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jeffrey Templon)
Fri Jan 10 11:15:03 1997
Date: Fri, 10 Jan 1997 05:19:37 -0500
From: Jeffrey Templon <templon@studbolt.physast.uga.edu>
To: linux-scsi@vger.rutgers.edu
Hi,
I have several TR-1 tapes which I have written using the ftape
driver at my previous job. My computer here (UGa) was
purchased with a TR-4 drive (SCSI) after having explicitly
checked that this drive can read TR-1 tapes.
What I find, is that there are some formatting differences,
apparently, between SCSI and floppy tapes. I first found
that I had to write a user-level program to strip out the
ECC data from what I read off the tape ... ftape writes
3k of ECC after each 29k of data. That wasn't so hard.
The toughie is that after reading 12550144 bytes of data
(before stripping the ECC stuff), the SCSI drive begins
to do some serious searching on the tape, can't find what
it is looking for, and then exits after informing syslog
that there were medium errors and read errors on the tape.
The Win95 program which came with the drive is happy to read
the tape, but it doesn't find any DOS files on the tape, so
it exits without letting me pull any files off.
What I'd like to do is figure out how to get my archives
(big afio backups) off these tapes! Any help or suggestions
are welcomed. Thanks.
JT
