Also Sprach Jon LaBadie:

> On Solaris there is a command, tcopy (tapecopy) intended for making,
> duh, copies of tapes.
> 
> I've only used it for analysis.  If given only a source tape it reports
> each file something like:
> 
>    file 4:
>    2083 records of 32K
>    1 record of 18321 bytes
>    EOF
> 
> and continues on to the end of the tape.

Mr. LaBadie - thanks very much for the recommendation to use tcopy.
I eventually did something similar by running dd in a loop, and got back
almost all of the 12GB of the tar archive except for a few bad blocks.
I concatenated the pieces together into one file.

However the tar archive was compressed using gzip and trying to
restore with tar stops at the first missing record:

gzip: stdin: invalid compressed data--crc error

gzip: stdin: invalid compressed data--length error
Error 32 (Broken pipe) offset 630423552+32768, wrote 0
amrestore: pipe reader has quit in middle of file.
amrestore: skipping ahead to start of next file, please wait...
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now


Is there a way to recover from such an error in a gzip tar archive
by using a binary editor to add fake data?

----
C. Chan <c-chan AT uchicago DOT edu >
GPG Public Key registered at pgp.mit.edu