How to get past end of cpio archive on tape

[Randy Jarrett]

In <1990Dec12.050414.15575 at bjm.wimsey.bc.ca> news at bjm.wimsey.bc.ca (News Login) writes:

>Hi NET,
>	
>	I have this backup which I accidentally wrote a cpio archive over.  However
>the cpio archive is only 20 megabytes and therefore 1/3 of the tape.  What I
>really want to do is get past the cpio archive and just retreive the rest of
>the tape into a file and I will fix the remaining tar file by hand.  My 
>question is (drum roll please)
>how do get past the EOF marker at the end of the cpio?  I've tried dd, cat, 
>evmt (a utility which comes with ESIX [which I'm now running] which is similar
>to sco xenix's 'tape' utility) which allows me to get to the next eof but 
>not past
>it.  I don't really care how much past the eof I go (.5 to even 1 meg if I have
>to).  I think what I mostly overwrote was the /bin /usr/bin stuff. 


I have had a similar experence in the recent past. What I was able to do
was to read the first portion (your cpio) with the -ivtc option and using
the no-rewind device which will leave the tape sitting at the end of the
cpio section.  You can then continue on however you want to get the rest
of the tape.  In my case I used cpio with the 'k' option to skip bad sections
and start at the next valid header.  I don't know that tar has any such
options..  


Good luck


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