TAPE drive

UNIX HP-UX
1

I have used ioscan -fnC tape and the system identified the tape drive. what is the command to show a listing of what is on the tape? I have used ls /dev/rmt/rmt0 to no avail. can anyone help?

Thanks in advance

2

Welcome Randydog,

What are you expecting to be on the tape? It rather depends what it was written with.

You could try some of the following:-

tar -tvf tape_addr
dd if=tape_addr of=/large_filesystem/filename
restore -ivf tape_addr
cpio (not sure on the options)

I would have expected the first tape drive on your server to be at address /dev/rmt/0m or similar. Does that match what you have?

Regards,
Robin

3

thanks for the quick responce. yes /dev/rmt/0m is the first in the directory. I am trying to install software from the tape drive. I first want to see what is on the tape to verify it has on it what I need. I was on wondering if it could be as easy as ls /cdrom. I have to mount and umount the cdrom and I don't know if I have to do something similar for the tape drive with is external.

4

You can consider a tape as a single giant file of fixed size and unknown type, which can only be read beginning-to-end. You can't mount it, and how to use its contents depends on what it actually holds.

"tar" is a good guess -- that's short for "tape archive", a standard UNIX utility which gets used for a lot more than tapes but is still relevant here. If the tape holds a tar, then rbatte1's first instruction should help you, as "tar -tvf /path/to/device" is about as close as you can get to "ls" for a tarball.

It will have to read the entire tape to list all the contents, though! tar is not a filesystem, and a tape drive can't seek in the middle.

5

I'll give that a try, thanks!

---------- Post updated at 04:54 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:23 PM ----------

So, I did the tar -tvf /dev/rmt/0m and I received a tape drive error. Any suggestions to correct the error. I know the drive exists because when I ioscan tape it shows up.

6

Received what tape drive error? Be specific. Please show us exactly what you did and exactly what happened.

7

I entered: tar -tvm /dev/rmt/0m the system returned: Tar: tape read error

Thanks in advance for you help

8

I've added ICODE tags to your text to make the command and output clearer like this:-

Do you actually mean the command: tar -tvf /dev/rmt/0m instead? I would think that the m flag would error anyway. This would suggest that it is not a tar format tape. What install instructions do you have? There is probably a clue in there. Maybe it's just extracting an installer script that we can then examine. What do you have from the supplier?

Robin

9

I actually did use tar -tvf /dev/rmt/0m

sorry for the FAT finger

10

The m option is probally a type or?
I would do following, en look what can read the tape:

mt -f /dev/rmt/0m rewind && echo ok
mt -f /dev/rmt0m status && echo okidoki
tar -tvf /dev/rmt/0m 
cpio -itv /dev/0m

dd if=/dev/rmt/0m of=/tmp/0m.dd #should always work to read the tape
                             of=/dev/null #just test reading

#If you have hp-ux software on tape, you can use swinstall directly or use swcopy
#to check have it on disk as well. 
swcopy -s /dev/rmt/0m \* @ /full_path_to/depot
swinstall -s /full_path_to/depot -x patch_match_target=true SOFTWARENAME
1 Like
11

turns out it was a bad tape drive