[Info-vax] Exabyte tapes to disk

[David J Dachtera]

Chris wrote:
> 
> 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?
> 
> Thanks for all your help,
> Chris

First guess time (due to the lack of info other than "there is a bunch
of garbage before the data"):

What you may be seeing, if I understand you, is the length attribute
which precedes each record in a file having variable length records.

You don't describe how you're trying to read the disks using other
machines. ODS volumes are DEC-specific. So, its very confusing, lacking
more specific information.

If you'd like to correspond with me off the newsgroup (how to de-mung
the reply-to should be obvious), I'll try to be of more help.

D.J.D.