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To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
cc: cvance@tis.com
Subject: Need help recovering from tape (partially overwritten)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 1997 11:47:10 -0500
From: Chris Vance <cvance@tis.com>
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I generally store multiple archives on a single tape (2gig DAT) using
mt eom; tar cvf /dev/nrst0 <dirname>.

and to restore: mt fsf xxx ; tar xvf /dev/nrst0.

Unfortunately, last night I didn't jump to the end of the media before
writing a new tar (actually I use scripts to do all this, and one
screwed up) so it began to write a new tar file directly to the
beginning of the tape.  I hit ^C, but the damage was done; it wrote
part of the tar file, and an end of media mark.

Now I can't jump past the screwed up archive and access subsequent
ones on tape; mt won't seek past the end of the first archive.  I know
the rest of the archives on the tape are still there, if I can just
seek past that first archive (and the eom mark).  I only overwrote the
first 300k of the first archive.  If I lose the first one on the tape,
that's fine, I just want to restore the other 1+GB of archives.

How can I retrieve the rest of the archives off the tape?

thanks for the help,
chris.