SCO Xenix tar reading SUN tapes

[John Chapman]

In article <1220 at sixhub.UUCP>, davidsen at sixhub.UUCP (Wm E. Davidsen Jr) writes:
> In article <87 at joymrmn.UUCP> root at joymrmn.UUCP (Marcel D. Mongeon) writes:
> | I have a number of 60MB tapes which were written on a SUN. (I have
> | no idea which one).  They were written in tar format.  When I use
> | tar under Xenix 386, they come up as unreadable.
> 
>   To read them you will probably need a Sun to convert them to standard
> format. Sun has two formats, /dev/rst0 which is probably what you have,
> and /dev/rst8 which is QIC-24. QIC-24 is what the rest of the world
> uses, has a higher density and transfer rate, and should be the default
> for everything (but isn't).
> 


You definitely need qic24 (rst8) so check that; but you will also probably have
to byte-swap the tape (I do), e.g.

dd if=/dev/yourtape ibs=52100 conv=swab | tar tvf -

on your 386. Hope this helps.