2 Jul
2026
2 Jul
'26
7:56 p.m.
On Thu, Jul 2, 2026 at 10:18 AM Dennis Boone via cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
I totally agree with all of your thoughts here. My experiments were to try
to get some reads first then try tapeutils. setblk 0 does not work in
this case. If I can't even get out of the starting gate to read *anything*
then I think I need a new drive. I am happy to be proven wrong but I think
I will try another drive.
Bill
But when I try
to actually read a tape I get errors
Here are examples of the tape read commands, there are many variations
one
can try:
dd if=/dev/nst0 of=block1.bin
dd if=dev/nst0 of /dev/null bs=1024
etc
I would open a 2nd window and run the following
command to view the
system
messages while the dd program is running
dmesg | tail -50
result example:
[ 1802.404408] st0: Failed to read 1326 byte block with 1024 byte
transfer.
[ 1813.881884] st0: Failed to read 3846 byte
block with 1024 byte
transfer
Two things:
1. If you `setblk 0` and use a large enough ibs= with dd, it'll read
variable block sizes just fine.
2. DON'T ARCHIVE VARIABLE BLOCKED TAPES WITH DD!!!! It throws away
information. Use a tool that preserves the block sizes. E.g.:
https://github.com/brouhaha/tapeutils
De