A/UX: Problem Retrieving Files From Apple 40SC Tape


Article Change History
----------------------
08/31/92 - REVIEWED
* For technical accuracy.


Using an Apple Tape Drive, I tried loading the third-party UNIX applications
you shipped to our office on two cartridges. I didn't have directions for
extracting the files from the tape, so I used tar. The system replies with a
Tape Read Error.

The following commands were unsuccessful:

tar -tvf /dev/dsk/t0
tar -tvf /dev/dsk/t1
tar tvf /dev/dsk/t0
tar tvf /dev/dsk/t1
tar -xvf /dev/dsk/t0
tar -xvf /dev/dsk/t1
tar xvf /dev/dsk/t0
tar xvf /dev/dsk/t1

The following commands were successful:

mt -f /dev/dsk/t1 rewind
mt -f /dev/dsk/t1 fsf 1

What did I do wrong?

You should have received the instructions to install from the two tapes. The
two A/UX demo tapes distributed by A/UX Technical Resources contain many
third-party Macintosh/UNIX applications (approximately 80MB). Most of these
files are compressed tar format.

The instructions describe in great detail the contents of the tapes, how much
space is required, and how to extract files. We would suggest that you get the
instructions before trying to extract any files.

In general, instead of "/dev/dsk/", you should use something like "/dev/rmt/tc
". All logical tape units are stored in the /dev/rmt directory. Also, since
the Apple 40SC Tape Driver has an 8K buffer boundary in the kernel, you need to
state a block factor option in the "tar" command.


Published Date: Feb 18, 2012