[Bug-tar] tar: unable to read LTO4 tapes on a LTO5 drive using tar

[peter.chiu]

Hi all,

My sincere apologies that this is really a query about the use of tar, rather 
than a bug report.

But I shall really appreciate if anyone can help.

A colleague has got some LTO4 tapes, which are believed to be written using a 
tar command with a switch of -b 1024.

However, we tried tar -b 1024 -tvf /dev/nst0

we are getting io errors.

We put in a blank LTO4 tape, and with that, a simple tar -cvf /dev/nst0 
followed by tar -xvf /dev/nst0 works.

So we cannot make out why we cannot read the LTO4 tapes.

Much appreciated if anyone can share some idea how to resolve this.

Regards,

Peter Chiu

STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
RAL Space Department
Building R25, Room 2.02
Harwell Oxford
Didcot
OXON
OX11 0QX
UK