HELP! Bad 8mm tape!

[Richard A Johnson]

raj at pollux.geog.ucsb.edu (Richard A Johnson) writes:

Remember this message?

>HELP!  I need help from anyone out there who has dealt with 8mm video tape
>drives a lot!  Here's the problem:

>I backed up this person's files on 8mm video tape (just the /u files that is).
>Then I totally reinstalled their system from scratch bring it up to the latest
>rev. later (3005 - but it's not really relevant).  I then proceeded to restore
>their files.  That's when I found that the tape had a bad spot!  If you
>manually advance the tape a little you find a place where it's crinkled a
>little bit.  When the drive gets to that part it stops reading and returns
>an error ("The media surface is damaged").

>Eventhough "restore" says it's "Ignoring data and continuing", it doesn't get
>anywhere because the drive simply can't track past that bad part!

Well, here's the answer!  I hope it helps someone else sometime.

If you simply run the restore as normal and let it keep printing the error
message about "Ignoring data and continuing" over and over and over...
(It takes on the ordr ot 6 hours so just let it run forever!)  it WILL finally
get past that part and retrieve the rest of the data!  Strange but true!
Probably it advances the tape a very little bit every time the read call is
issued so you just have to let it try and try and try...

I talked to the IBM person who got me this answer and we agreed that the
IBM documentation people should think seriously about adding something
somewhere in their documentation saying that this is possible.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard A. Johnson                             raj at ncgia.ucsb.edu  (Internet)
NCGIA Computing Resources Manager              ucbvax!ucivax!raj       (UUCP)
U. C. Santa Barbara                            raj at VOODOO        (via BITNET)