I just saw this in another forum and was curious if anyone has an answer.  It seems likely the E, U, Q, T are probably drive letters from Windows that of course mean nothing in Linux/UNIX.  

NOTE: 

The question is NOT how to do alternate path restore using NBU – it is specifically asking can the tape be extracted using GNU-tar on a Linux (Centos 4) box:

The OP’s Q:

I can find a tar readable file header using "tar -tvf /dev/tape1 -b 500" but unfortunatly the directory appears to be corrupted.

I am attempting to recover a windows backup onto centos 4.

I get the following output from tar;

tar: Record size = 128 blocks
?rwx------ / 80 2007-04-21 01:03:40 \001 unknown file type `E'
?rwx------ root/root 0 2007-04-21 01:03:40 /L/ unknown file type `U'
tar: Skipping to next header
?rwx------ root/root 0 2007-04-21 01:03:40 unknown file type `Q'
?rwx------ / 216 2007-04-21 01:03:40 \001 unknown file type `E'
?rwx------ root/root 0 2007-04-20 23:30:00 /L/Backups Database/ unknown file type `U'
tar: Skipping to next header
?rwx------ root/root 0 2007-04-20 23:30:00 unknown file type `Q'
?rwx------ root/root 268386 2007-04-20 09:00:00 \001 unknown file type `T'
?rwx------ root/root 0 2007-04-20 09:00:00 unknown file type `Q'
?rwx------ root/root 727 2007-04-17 15:00:03 \001 unknown file type `T'
?rwx------ root/root 0 2007-04-17 15:00:03 unknown file type `Q'
?rwx------ root/root 32563712 2007-04-20 21:18:49 \001 unknown file type `T'
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

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