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From: olson@anchor.esd.sgi.com (Dave Olson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: Re: Exabyte - can't read OS3.2 tapes from OS3.3
Keywords: Exabyte
Message-ID: <11041@odin.corp.sgi.com>
Date: 27 Jul 90 19:32:59 GMT
References: <1990Jul27.161034.6142@watserv1.waterloo.edu>
Sender: news@odin.corp.sgi.com
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.  Mountain View, CA
Lines: 27

In <1990Jul27.161034.6142@watserv1.waterloo.edu> afleming@watsci.uwaterloo.ca (Allan Fleming) writes:

| I am unable to read exabyte tapes that were written under OS 3.2 
| while using OS 3.3. All I get is a message from bru - warning end
| of volume one - while at the begining of the tape. I can read exabyte
| tapes written under OS 3.3 - Help, Allan Fleming

This was a bug introduced into 3.3, and is one of the bugs fixed in the
'real' 3.3 (3.3.1) release that will actually ship to customers.  The
3.3 release that some customers have received was shipped only to customers
requiring it for new hardware, and in some cases at the discretion of
sales offices for 'important' bug fixes.

The work around is to read the tape with 
	dd if=/dev/tape bs=1k | bru -vtf - ...

and similarly for writing.  Note that this is not the same block size that
is set with -b, that is the blocking factor.

The default block size for Exabytes was changed by an editting mistake
to 512 instead of 1024 bytes.  This problem didn't show up with tar,
and slipped past testing.
--

	Dave Olson

Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.