On Thursday 28 November 2002 12:21, Lars Segerlund wrote:
>  Have you tried extracting the 'file chunk' and running file on
> it ?
>
>  If I remember corectly, Amiga's didn't use tar , they hade a
> couple of other popular archivers.

That they did, they were rather fond of .lha, .lzx, bzip2 and 
friends.  They all seem to incorporate something like the tar 
recursive file collection mechanism as a builtin.

>  Also perhaps you can run a restore under an Amiga emulator ?
>  ( works for x86 ... I have run it ) might be the easiest
> solution.

Unforch, the emulator, UAE-0.8.22, can't access the local scsi buss 
to read the tapes, I've spent many hours trying to get around that.  
If it could, then I'd just run Diavolo on the emulator.

Unforch, the big file, the one with all the backups in it, is 
something over 3.5 gigs, and not even khexedit can open it.
I've done a head on it, and I can see some strings but the rest 
looks pretty well scrambled.  Mostly by linefeeds in the darndest 
places, like the first character of a line is often the last char 
on the previous line & the word continues on the next line.

So I'm scanning it with something resembling this:
#>strings amigatape.4|grep -B100 -A2500 ZHome.src-09-05-2k 
>ezhome.src

and getting output with badly broken up lines, but those can be 
fixed easily enough.  I'm finetuning the -B and -A options because 
the strings version of a line and the actual line count are going 
to be at high variance.  But its working well enough that I could, 
if I had a working amiga, bring it back to life & thats what counts 
at the end of the day.

Thanks Lars, the conversation leads to thought, and the thought may, 
an indeed has seemed to stumble onto a useable solution.
Sometimes I get lost in the trees and can't see the forest. ;-(
Maybe I could call it a senior moment? :-)

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M
Athlon1600XP@1400mhz  512M
99.19% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly