On Thu, Apr 24, 2003 at 04:06:16PM -0500, C. Chan wrote:
> 
> I experimented with different ibs= settings and spacing forward a
> number of records but without any better result.

Including bs=1 ?

> Are there any standard tools better tools than dd for extracting
> the data record by record from a tape?

Don't know your OS.

On Solaris there is a command, tcopy (tapecopy) intended for making,
duh, copies of tapes.

I've only used it for analysis.  If given only a source tape it reports
each file something like:

   file 4:
   2083 records of 32K
   1 record of 18321 bytes
   EOF

and continues on to the end of the tape.

If given a destination also, which could be a disk file, it will copy the
tape to that destination.  Perhaps you could fsf to the beginning of the
12GB tape file and let it copy until at least 2 eof's or first eof after
12GB and then interupt it to avoid getting the entire tape.  Once on disk
a binary editor might be able to determine/fix the corruption.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
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