On Mon, Apr 25, 2005 at 02:40:30PM -0500, Bryan K. Walton wrote:
> I'm trying to restore some files and am running into errors.  Some
> background:
> 
> The directory I am trying to restore sits on the same machine as the
> actual amanda backup server.  Both the amanda client and amanda server
> are 2.4.4p3. I'm restoring the files on the same machine that did the actual
> backing up.  I'm using tar version 1.13.25.  From my research on the web,
> I know that there have been problems with certain version of tar, but 1.13.25
> is supposed to be a good version.  And since I'm using the same machine
> to extract as I am to compress, it seems that there shouldn't be any
> problems with different compression algorithms. Regardless of whether I use
> amrecover or amrestore, I get errors:
> 
> 
> WITH AMRECOVER:
> 
> tar: Skipping to next header
> tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
> tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
> extract_list - child returned non-zero status: 2
> 
> WITH AMRESTORE:
> 
> tar: Skipping to next header
> tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
> gzip: stdin: invalid compressed data--crc error
> gzip: stdin: invalid compressed data--length error
> amrestore:  29: reached end of information
> tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
> 
> 

The gzip error really concerns me.  That should happen
before tar sees the data so I'd be tempted to ignore
the tar errors at first.

I'd recommend falling back to basic unix commands.
Get a dump file off of the tape
   mt rewind ; mt fsf <some number>
   dd bs=32k if=<tapedevice> of=<outputfile> skip=1

Check that the file cmd does believe it is gzip'ed data.
   file <outputfile>

Unzip it gunzip  < outputfile   > unzippedfile

Check it with the file cmd (should know it is gnutar archive)

Try to do a table of contents
   gtar tvf < unzippedfile

If that works, try the extraction you need with gtar.

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