> Just out of sheer curiosity.....
>
> I acidentially re-labeled a bunch of tapes that shouldn't have been re-
> labeled.  I know the warning message says "all data will be lost, etc.
> etc.", however I was just curious to see if anybody has, through some
> utility, or the power of magic, been able to recover data from a volume
> that has been re-labeled.

It is unlikely you'd be able to do much with just normal unix tools and
hardware.

Relabling has the tape write data at the beginning of the tape.
Standard drives will refuse to read data past that point.

Recovery houses have both software and hardware to recover the data in
situations like this, but they tend to charge a lot.  If you went that
route, I'd guess your chances of recovery would be close to excellent.

> I know I'm pretty much out of luck, but if
> somebody out there has been able to somehow make this happen, i'd love to
> hear from you... Thanks!

The hardest part is getting the hardware to read past the EOT mark that
the relabel wrote.

If someone *really* was desparate and wasn't going to attempt things
from the recovery house, you could try to forward the tape to EOT, begin
some writes, then power off the drive during the writes.  That will keep
it from writing a new EOT when the write completes.  Then it's possible
that you could 'scanner' in the old data.

However, I've tried this in the past with DLT tapes and never had much
success.  Getting the drive to resync to the data past the power-off
point never seemed to work for me.  I haven't tried in some time though.

--
Darren Dunham                                           ddunham AT taos DOT com
Senior Technical Consultant         TAOS            http://www.taos.com/
Got some Dr Pepper?                           San Francisco, CA bay area
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