tar - versions?

[ME]

Yet another one that was sent but never made it to the list...

On Thu, 29 Mar 2001, ME wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Mar 2001 cdlcruz at sonic.net wrote:
> > I am a newbie.  At work I manage some complex programs on SCO Unix System
> > V/386 Rel 3.2
> > Since SCO stopped supporting it in 1994, it has become obvious to management
> > that some upgrade path is needed.  I have installed Red Hat 7 on my own
> > machine and am struggling to learn Linux as well as the old version of Unix.
> > 
> > To explore some of the options, I need to download a tape from the SCO system
> > to the RH7; same tape drive (Seagate Python).  However, when I try 'tar -xvf
> > /dev/st0' the tape drive starts to whirl, then  RH informs me that 'this does
> > not look like a tar achive' then exits.  
> > 
> > Any suggestions?  I REALLY NEED the data that is on this tape.
> 
> Is is possible that the tape created on the SCO box was created with
> "dump" , "cpio" or some kind of commercial backup software?
> 
> Have you verified the contents of the tape on the SCO box to make sure the
> tape is not damaged and the data is really there?
> 
> Are you using the same exact tape drive? (Differences in tape drives with
> head location, and hardware compression systems may make tape from one
> drive unreadable by another drive.)
> 
> Are both systems using the same architecture? (EG: HP SureStore 8eu DAT
> backup drive has dip switches for different architectres: DEC Alpha, Sun
> Sparc, Intel/PC)
> 
> look through the reports from dmesg to see that your tape drive is
> properly identified (search for "st0") and the name listed matches your
> device.
> 
> It the tape rewound? (check out mt for control of the tape drive. If you
> are in fact using the same drive, you may need to use mt to enable
> hardware compression if for some reason the tape drive itself does not
> recoignize the contents of the tape as hardware compressed.)
> 
> There is no SCSI ID conflict with another SCSI device is there?
> 
> ...
> 
> 
>