I have a need to read some old AIT-2 tapes that were last written in
2000.  Phase 1 of the import works fine, but phase 2 does not.  It fails
at the end of the first tape, and I can't see a way to force the product
to just skip past the errors and get the rest of the data.  The tapes
are not multiplexed, so I attempted to use the tar command supplied by
Veritas to extract the data.

The system that wrote the tape was a Sun Sparc 220, running NetBackup
version 3.4. 
Today I'm using the same tape library, connected to a linux system
running version 6.0MP4.
As part of the 6.0MP4 environment, the linux system can read and write
to the AIT media just fine, except for the occasional bad tape.

I performed the restore of WindowsNT files, onto a linux filesystem,
which generates a lot of messages with each file and the SeCuRiTy file
that is being skipped because of the system I'm using.

The command that I used was this.

/usr/openv/netbackup/bin/tar -xvif /dev/nst0 -b 64

(adding the 'i' flag seemed to make it work)

Which extracted the contents of the tape to the directory where I
started the command.  I was able to pull about 200gb of data from four
tapes.  All of the files are unusable.  The files I want are jpegs,
documentation photos of various products, and each of them contains
extra data in the file header that most applications cannot read. 
Irfanview can read it, and has the ability to do batch processing, so I
can convert all the image data back into normal jpegs with a little bit
of effort.  The 'file' command in linux reports all the restored data to
be "DBase 3 data file (2 records)". 

Has anyone been successful with the command line tar for restoring data
from tape, or is there some way to tell NB to get what you can during an
import, and ignore the failures?

-Jon