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From: davel@booboo.SanDiego.NCR.COM (David Lord)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ncr
Subject: Re: NCR Tape Formats
Keywords: Tape Quick-24 tar cpio formats compatibility
Message-ID: <1991Mar19.180054.22101@SanDiego.NCR.COM>
Date: 19 Mar 91 18:00:54 GMT
References: <9906@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> <115@crystal1.UUCP>
Sender: @SanDiego.NCR.COM
Reply-To: davel@booboo.SanDiego.NCR.COM (David Lord)
Organization: NCR Corporation, Rancho Bernardo
Lines: 31

In article <115@crystal1.UUCP> jw@crystal1.UUCP (John S. Wainscott) writes:
>In article <9906@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM>, petej@itcode.Eng.Sun.COM (Pete Jolly) writes:
 
>> tar: directory checksum error (1 != 5663)
 

>I've seen this quite a bit when dealing with Towers.  If you create a tape
>on a Tower and want to load it on another Unix machine use this:

>dd if=/dev/[whatever] conv=swab | tar xvf -

>This will do some byte swapping so the checksum will come out correctly.
>You can use this command on the Tower while trying to load a tape from
>another system.

This actually only happens on certain models of Towers. I believe the
600 was this way. I think all the newer Towers have normal byte ordering. I
used to have to do this a lot even going from one Tower to another one
of a different model, and of course we don't put the model number on the
front of the box so you have to guess which way it's going to be. Typically 
I try to read it without byte swapping first and if that doesn't work 
then I use the byte swapping.

Oh, and when you read a Sun tar tape on a Tower you will get an error at
the end of the tape which you can just ignore.

While I work for NCR my only connection with Towers is that I've used a
bunch of them. Now I'm using the 486's which I like a lot better than I
ever liked the Towers (or the Suns for that matter).

Dave.Lord@SanDiego.NCR.com