Reading an unknown DAT Tape
Mark Atkinson
atkin901 at gmail.com
Thu Mar 15 21:15:51 UTC 2012
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On 03/15/2012 14:02, Jerry McAllister wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 03:17:05PM -0500, Martin McCormick wrote:
>
>> This is a case of idle curiosity and not an urgent need to
>> recover a valuable backup. I found an old DAT tape and attempted
>> to read it on the very drive that probably once wrote it and it
>> appears to read the tape properly in that I can use dd to copy it
>> to a file and mt fsf 5, for example, takes the tape to the fifth
>> file marker so there is sanity.
>>
>> Tar, however, does not recognize the format of the archive so it
>> is either something proprietary or I am not using the correct
>> utility on it.
>>
>> I opened it with dd files=2 if=/dev/sa0 of=testfile and then did
>> the strings utility on testfile and got:
>>
>> TAPE SSET VOLB DIRB NACL Setting security iles SPAD DIRB NACL
>> Setting security on system files... SPAD DIRB NACL SPAD DIRB
>> NACL SPAD FILE NACL STAN Jun 23 2003 12:00AM Jan 1 1900 8:45AM
>> Jan 1 1900 9:00AM
>
> I wondered about it being a dump(8) file, but just tried one and
> strings output looked a little different.
>
> How about a db of some sort or a log from some lab test?
>
> ////jerry
>
>
>
>>
>> Note that we are obviously able to read data from the tape as the
>> top few lines are readible as words. The time stamps at the
>> bottom are possibly not time stamps as some of them are not
>> plausible.
>>
>> The dd command never faltered with errors although I did finally
>> stop it manually.
>>
>> Is there any FreeBSD utility that can tell more about what
>> created the original archive?
>>
>> Thank you.
>>
>> Martin McCormick
A quick check of Google with the strings you dumped points at
Microsoft Tape format. Possibly from the win2k utility.
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