[geeks] Old Archives

[Paul Dunlop]

About a year ago, I had a Sun Solaris system built in order to access 
information on a number of Quarter Inch Cartridges (QIC). These QIC's 
were created in the early to mid 1980's, on SPARC i386's, using Bar 
Compress (the SysAdmin at the time flipped a coin to see if he should 
use Bar or Tar). Our local 'guru' was able to build the system, 
figure out how to deal with the Bar Compression, and I was able to 
get all the data from all the tapes. Life was good!

This year we found more tapes and many 3.5" floppies. We were able to 
extract the data from all the QIC's except for 4. These 4 tapes were 
created as a spanned Bar Compressed file. In other words, one file 
was written across the 4 tapes. Also, when working with the 3.5" 
floppies, I think I'm running into the same problem - whenever a bar 
compress file is written across more than one piece of media, I'm not 
able to extract the information.

Here are the steps used on the QIC's:
With the tape inserted in the drive, type:
dd if=/dev/rmt/0b of=dump

Once the dump file is created, extract the data by typing:
cpio -ivdH bar < dump

When the bar compress file is spanned across multiple media, I create 
a dump file for each media, naming them dump1, dump2, dump3, etc.
dd if=/vol/dev/rdiskette0/unknown_format of=dump1

Once all the dump files are created, I concatenate them into a single 
dump file.
cat dump1 dump2 dump3 > dump

Now when I use the cpio command on the concatenated dump file, or if 
I run the cpio command on the first dump file (dump1), I receive the 
following message:
cpio: Can't read input: end of file encountered prior to expected end 
of archive.

If I run the cpio command on the second, third, etc, dump file, I 
receive the following message:
error: This is not volume 1. This is volume 2. Please insert volume 
1.

Our local guru is gone. A search for a new local guru has turned up 
nothing. Is there anyone out there that knows what this problem is 
and how to fix it?

THANKS!