On Friday, January 28, 2005, at 05:59 PM, Peter L. Peres wrote:

>
>
> Hi list, I posted this message a few days ago and there was no 
> reaction.
Perhaps, few people have tapes these days, compared to tv cards, sounds 
cards, dual cpu, and dvd...

> My conclusion is that there may be potentially very bad problems with 
> tar used on st (scsi qic tape)
> devices. Is this a problem that was seen by others, or am I the only 
> one ? It seems to be related to the tar+st combination since other 
> programs (mt, dd) seem to operate correctly with tar, and tar itself 
> does not seem to have other problems. the net holds some testimonies 
> about problems with tapes under linux. Are they shared by netbsd ?
>

Maybe try, cpio , pax, or dump, see if anything changes.  Your tar 
contains 3 files right? Not you have have 3 tars containing 1 file each 
on the tape?
Can you use dd to copy the tar off the tape to disk, then examine the 
tar file for completeness. If its a gzipped tar you wouldn't need the 
exact size, as gunzip will ignore trailing garbage.   You could also 
pipe dd into tar... but if dd works and tar by itself doesn't my wild 
guess would be block sizes.


>
<...>
> dd leaves the tape at the start of the next file, block 0. 
> Additionally, if I use /dev/rst0 instead of /dev/nrst0 with tar, it 
> rewinds and exits normally without extracting

I haven't used tapes in maybe 10 years, and that was on sunos, but I 
seem to remeber 1 device was configured to always rewind on close() , 
and other ones not...  like r for tape
meant rewinding st0 not 'raw' , i think it was an historical unix thing 
not just a sun thing... but its been a while.