Thanks again guys for your quick and informative responses.

The main problem was the lack of coffee at 9:30pm onwards at night but essentially this command is what did it for me:
dd if=/dev/rmt/0n bs=32k skip=1 | /usr/local/bin/tar -xv -f -

Worked like a treat and I am now up-and-running once again!

Thanks to all those who responded...

Cheers,
Gordon.

-----Original Message-----
From: Gordon Cormack
Sent: Wednesday, 25 September 2002 9:39 PM
To: amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
Subject: Restore from tape (not using Amanda) syntax

Hi Peoples,

I'm trying to dump from an Amanda tape onto the hard-drive by not using Amanda. This is probably a "you don't know how to use tar properly" question but:

        #mt -f /dev/rmt/0n status
        Vendor 'SONY    ' Product 'SDX-300C       ' tape drive:
        sense key(0x6)= Unit Attention   residual= 0   retries= 0
        file no= 0   block no= 0

        #mt -f /dev/rmt/0n rewind

I'm obviously doing something wrong here cause the command:
        #dd if=/dev/rmt/0n bs=32k skip=1 | /usr/local/bin/tar -cv -f /export/output.tar
        /usr/local/bin/tar: Cowardly refusing to create an empty archive

The tape only has about 2GB of compressed data on it so it's not huge...

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Gordon.