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From: krowitz@RICHTER.MIT.EDU (David Krowitz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re:  tar cartrige from SUN
Message-ID: <9008211316.AA15689@richter.mit.edu>
Date: 21 Aug 90 13:16:26 GMT
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Sun's tar cartridge tapes may or may not be physically readable on the
Apollo's tape drive. The Apollo drives (including the newer SCSI cartridge
tape drives) use the QIC-24 recording format, which puts 60 MB of data on
a DC600A cartridge or 45 MB onto a DC300XL/P cartridge. Older Sun-3's had
drives which could recording in both the older QIC-11 format and the QIC-24
format. The QIC-11 format is a lower density format which you got when you
used the /dev/rst0 device. When you used /dev/rst8, you got the QIC-24 format.
QIC-11 tapes are not readable on the Apollo drives.

If your tape came from a Sparcstation, the situation is different. The Sparc
cartridge tape drives use DC600 series tapes only (the DC300XL/P's won't work),
and can handle either the QIC-24 format or a newer, higher density format
(maybe QIC-120?) which puts 120 MB onto a DC600A cartridge. Again, the format
depends on the device used to write the tape. The Sparcstation tapes are
readable *if* they were written in QIC-24 format *and* you are using an
SR10 machine to run "tar" (in particular: our DN3500 with the internally mounted
SCSI cartridge tape drive running SR10.2 works fine with a simple
"/bin/tar xvf /dev/rmts8" -- we've used this before in the recent past. I
think our DN560 also worked with "/bin/tar xvf /dev/rct8").


 -- David Krowitz

krowitz@richter.mit.edu   (18.83.0.109)
krowitz%richter.mit.edu@eddie.mit.edu
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