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From: hulsebos@philmds.UUCP (Rob Hulsebos)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.microport,comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Corrupted backup floppies from cpio
Message-ID: <838@philmds.UUCP>
Date: 18 Oct 88 08:27:25 GMT
References: <6794@chinet.chi.il.us> <4873@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us>
Reply-To: hulsebos@philmds.UUCP (Rob Hulsebos)
Organization: Philips I&E DTS Eindhoven
Lines: 25

In article <6794@chinet.chi.il.us> johnk@chinet.chi.il.us (John Kennedy) writes:
>When I went to restore the files, with a cpio -icdumv < /dev/rdsk/0s24,
>the first few disks read okay, but then the "out of phase. get help"
>message appeared.  Apparently the disks were not written correctly.
Yes, I've seen this bug too. Apparently, when 'cpio' writes to its output-
device but gets an error, it just cancels writing the current file without
giving an error, and continues with the next file. But because a header is
already written to floppy, and the file written after the header does not
match the length noted in the header, 'cpio' gets out-of-sync when it reads
the disk back :-(

Tar behaves better in this aspect.
To my humble opinion, 'cpio' should at least give an error-message. As it is 
now, you're required to read back disks written with 'cpio' immediately after
they have been made, unless you're 100% sure that the disks are OK. 

In article <4873@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us> zeeff@b-tech.UUCP (Jon Zeeff) writes:
>You can use the fixcpio program or I believe that you can use afio.
>Sources for both should be available from archive sites.
The best solution would be to fix 'cpio'. 

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