20011031: specific humidity grids from NCAR MassStore on tape at UVa (cont.)

>From: Anthony James Wimmers <address@hidden>
>Organization: UVa
>Keywords: 200004270006.e3R06rG00226 McIDAS-X -XCD dmgrid.k gbtbpds001.*

Tony,

>I'd like to help, but I'm getting a tape read error on both
>of those tapes.  The command I'm using is
>
>tar tvf /dev/rmt/0n
>
>Is it the tape or is it me?

It could be either depending on how the tape was written.

Our system admin, Mike Schmidt, suggested trying the following:

dd if=/dev/rmt/0n bs=500kb of=/home/mcidas/dumpfile

In this invocation, you should replace '/home/mcidas' with
a directory location where you have LOTS of disk space.

If the tape is OK, dd will copy data from it to 'dumpfile'.  Since
the tape may have 8 GB of data (given that it is an exabyte tape),
you will probably want to kill dd (CTRL-C it) before the entire
contents is dumped.  Then you can use the Unix 'file' utility
to find out what the format of the data really is.

If, on the other hand, the tape really is bad (or your tape drive
is having problems), then you will get an error with dd in much
the same way that you got with tar.

In either case, thanks for trying!

Tom