From HPUX tar to Linux tar

Dear sirs,

I have some 4mm dat cartridges (4GB) made in a HP-UX 11.00 with a standard tar command (tar -cv files_to_backup) made with a scsi dat drive HP 35470A.

After more than one year I need to restore some data on a linux system (Red Hat 7.2) which has the same dat drive.

Now I tried to list the content of the cartridges but without any result.
In particular I used the following command:

$tar -tvf /dev/st0

After this command the lights on the tape driver blink and the tape run. But after 3-4 seconds everything stop and the prompt $ apper after the above command whithout any other message.
I tried also to use the following command

$tr -tvbf n /dev/st0

replacing n with different numbers (1-10-20-512)
but with the same result.
I tried all the above also as "su" and with other similar cartidges.

After the first blink and run of the tape driver if I repeat the command I get istantly the prompt symbol $ without any activity on the tape. To have a new activity (blink for some seconds) I have to extract and re-insert the tape.

Please, what I can do to list (and extract) my files from the catridges? What else can I try?
Thanks

Something that comes immediately to my mind: find an HP-UX 11 machine just to be sure that you can read them on an HP machine itself. If not, then you possibly have a bad tape.

If they are readable on an HP, then it could be that you may need to refer to the tape drive as a different device.

Best Wishes!

This question really needs one person who is an expert in both HP-UX and Linux. I can shed some light. By default, tar on HP-UX 11.0 will create a Posix style archive. Older versions of tar will not understand what a Posix style archive is.

There is a program that I have heard of, but never used, called "pax" that may also be able to read a Posix archive.

Just something to consider. How large are the files you are trying to retsore? Many versions of Tar have problems when you go over 2GB for a aingle file. IRIX has portability issues with files over a certain size for instance.

Sorry - I'm not much help really.

Linux has some ridiculously large max files size, in the hundreds of petabyte range, although I don't know what kernel / FS version that began with, so his system still may have the multi-gig limit.

It very well may be the issue of Posix tar vs. GNU tar, but I have tar'd files on a Linux machine, then ftp'd tem over to an HP-UX box, where they untarred just fine, and vice versa...

This may not be the *best* solution, but what about trying to dump the tape to a file? If you have some disk space, you could use dd, or even cat to dump it:
dd if=/dev/st0 of=/tmp/my_test.tar

If you can get data off of the tape, then it at least exists; if not, you may have a bad tape / drive. Hope this helps a little.