Apart from several offers to read my tape (thanks! I sent the DAT to
one of the
kind people) I also got some hints on reading DAT backup tapes written
on DEC Alpha workstations:
Tasos: "I don't have an Alpha, but if you mount the tape in a Linux DAT
drive,
it might work. [...] there is no difference technically"
A colleague of Elspeth: "there's a unix program "vmsbackup" that might
be able to read it"
Dr. Thayumanasamy Somasundaram:
"I have written something that could potentially be helpful to you.
I am attaching the weblink here.
http://www.sb.fsu.edu/~xray/Manuals/Linux_Archiving.html
When I am confronted with reading tapes (usually from a synchrotron runs)
from mixed environments I use a DAT tape drive in Linux machine and try
combinations of "tar" "dd". When I migrated from SGI to Linux, I simply
couldn't move a tape to tape since the way in which SGI wrote the data was
exactly opposite of Linux. So the only way out was to go from DAT (aka DDS1)
to harddisk and then harddisk to DDS3 or DDS4.
I am also attaching the DAT manufacturer's website:
http://www.datmgm.com/ this website information about the compatibility
issues and other details.
The DAT tape (or DDS1) is readable by DDS2 and DDS3 tape-drives only. Same
way DDS3 tape is readable by DDS3, DDS4, and DDS5-drive (DAT72) only. Three
generations backward compatibility is only assured. This means DAT72 will
NOT read DDS2 or DDS1 (originally called DAT) so on ..."
Dale Tronrud: "You might be able to read it yourself on your SGI.
If I recall, the SGI's defaulted to some bazaar variable length blocking
of tar tapes, which no one else ever used. If you add a "-b 20" to your
tar command it might help."
Many thanks for all the replies! :)
This bulletin board is full of helpful and knowledgeable people.
Wojtek
--
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Prof. dr hab. Wojciech Rypniewski tel: +48-61-8528503
Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry fax: +48-61-8520532
Polish Academy of Sciences e-mail: [log in to unmask]
Noskowskiego 12/14 www: www.man.poznan.pl/~wojtekr/
61-704 Poznan, Poland
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