I have two tar DAT tapes written by a desktop Sun made DAT drive connected to a
Ultra-2 running V2.5 of Solaris. One tape was written to the /dev/rmt/0lbn and one to the
/dev/rmt/obn devices. I was under the impression that the l meant low density mode, and
the b meant Berkeley format tar archives ?

I can read neither of these tapes on my NetBSD/Intel V1.2.1
machine with an Archive/Viper (I think) DAT drive. The message from the tar session is:

tar -tvf /dev/rst0
Nov 19 20:52:21 netcontech /netbsd: st0(aha0:5:0): no data found,
requested size: 10240 (decimal), data = 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

Now I am thinking maybe it is a byte order problem (are tar archives byte
order dependent ?). So I tried:

dd if=/dev/rst0 conv=swap | tar -tvf -

And I get:

dd if=/dev/rst0 | tar -tvf -
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes transferred in 1 secs (0 bytes/sec)

Nov 19 20:54:17 netcontech /netbsd: st0(aha0:5:0): no data found,
requested size: 512 (decimal), data = 00 1e cb 0c 51 32 65 00 1c 11

All of the above tests were performed with the /dev/rmt/0lbn tape.

Can someone explain how I can read these tar archives on my NetBSD/Intel
machine ?

Please copy my address as I do not subscribe to these lists.

Thanks

Scott
Scott.Burns@Netcontech.com