Re: Tape Exchange between AS/400 and NCR

[Chuck Lewis <CLEWIS@xxxxxxxxxx>]

WOW !

You'd THINK that in this day and age, stuff like this wouldn't be surch a 
hassle,
eh ? <BG>

Thanks for the info Don !

Chuck


Don Kuenz wrote:

> If you use a reel tape it should work because you can leave off the standard
> IBM label.
>
> But, if you use a Quarter Inch Cartridge (QIC) drive, you're out of luck,
> because AFAIK the AS400 *inisists* upon an IBM standard label on all tape
> cartridges. When you attempt to read a standard label using Linux, Solaris,
> or AIX, they all return an End Of Tape (EOT) condition just as soon as they
> read the label. It appears that the standard label uses a block size
> other than 512 bytes, while the unices expect 512 byte block sizes. This
> causes the premature EOT. It matters little what options you include with tar,
> cpio, dd, etc. It appears that the only way around this is to create a
> device driver that reads AS400 cartridges. You'll encounter literature,
> and sometimes even source code, on the Internet that suggests a way to
> exchange standard label tapes between a AS400 and a VMS, but these methods
> seem to assume that you use a reel tape.
>
> On slight ray of hope is that you *can* use the AS400 DUMP command to
> successfully read non-standard label, unix tapes. Unfortunately, this
> command wants to print whatever it finds on tape, it lacks an option to
> save data to a file. But, given this very slight success, there may be a
> way to use the documentation mentioned in the previous paragragh and create
> a standard label tape on your NCR.
>
> After several frustrating months trying to crack this problem I finally
> threw in the towel and instead used RUMBA to copy QIC tape files from/to
> a PC. At that point I used ftp, samba, etc. to copy them from/to unix.
>
> -Don Kuenz
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