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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.uoknor.edu!news.nodak.edu!netnews3.nwnet.net!netnews.nwnet.net!news.u.washington.edu!uw-beaver!nntp.cs.ubc.ca!psgrain!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!news.mathworks.com!fu-berlin.de!irz401!orion.sax.de!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Exabyte Exb4200S 4mm DAT probelms Date: 20 Aug 1996 22:03:04 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 25 Message-ID: <4vdcmo$i2g@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <3219E9ED.798C@wincom.net> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E Greg BNurton <southtec@wincom.net> wrote: > I have a Exabyte Exb4200S 4mm DAT external tape drive connected via > SCSI to an SGI Indigo2. Most of the time I cannot read tapes written > by other systems or even by and SGI computer with a differnet brand > tape drive. Also, tapes that I write are sometimes unreadable on other > systmes. I think I've narrowed the problem to incompatible > blocking factors. Alas, SGI uses a very large blocking factor (256 KB by default) that FreeBSD cannot even handle at all. You can use another blocking factor by utility-specific options like -B for tar(1), or by piping the data stream through dd(1): tar -cvf - some/dir/ectory | dd obs=32k of=/dev/rtape 32 KB is a reasonable value. tar often defaults to 10k only. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)