[Info-vax] Exabyte tapes to disk

[Bob Koehler]

In article <7eaf2ab1-64ff-45e7-9a2d-2c5378d3510b at k26g2000vbp.googlegroups.com>, Chris <cdandrea27 at yahoo.com> writes:
> We have 8mm exabyte tapes with archived data on them. Our old vax
> machines could read/write these tapes with no problem with exabyte
> tape drives (SCSI connection). We would like to get the data off of
> these tapes and eventually onto disks (so that the data is more easily
> accessible, don't have to mess with tape drives etc.). However,
> whenever we use our vax to copy the data to disk, the files are not
> readable by other machines (e.g. there is a bunch of garbage before
> the data). We have been unable to find a way to use any other machine
> to copy the data from the tape to disk. Has anyone had any success
> with something like this? What worked?

   Do you knowwhat command or software was used to put the files on the
   tape?

   8mm tape drives were only officially supported for BACKUP.  There are
   RMS operations that just don't work right on them.

   Exabyte 8500 drives were desupported even for BACKUP, at one time, too.

   If they are BACKUIP tapes, you might not be able to do a simple copy
   to get the backup save sets from them, you may need a utility such
   as TCOPY to deal with BACKUP's unusual tape error handling.  Backup
   save set manager was an optional product that could also do this,
   and of course you could use BACKUP to restore files from such a tape.

   Try BACKUP/LIST to see if they are legible save sets.