tarr issues with physical tape drive ?

[vom513 <vom513%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hello all,

I have been messing around with some tape drives on NetBSD.  The one in question now is a bit older (Sun branded HP DDS4) - but it was new old stock right out of the factory box.  It’s been cleaned as well.

So under NetBSD - I can write to tape seemingly just fine.  Reading back (extracting) however goes south immediately.  Using the stock tar I get “damaged archive” and it gives up soon after starting the operation.

I saw some old message of someone on FreeBSD having (what I thought was) a similar issue to me - and they used GNU tar to work around this.  I built gtar from pkgsrc, but it fails in basically the same way (albeit with a different “skipping to next header” type error).

I put this same tape drive on an x86 PC running Debian Linux 12 and I get no errors at all.  It behaves exactly as I would expect.

Is there something in NetBSD that precludes me from using this hardware properly ?

Thanks.