tar - versions?

[Kevin Jamieson]

On Thu, Mar 29, 2001 at 07:40:31PM -0000, cdlcruz at sonic.net wrote:
> I am a newbie.  At work I manage some complex programs on SCO Unix System
> V/386 Rel 3.2
> Since SCO stopped supporting it in 1994, it has become obvious to management
> that some upgrade path is needed.  I have installed Red Hat 7 on my own
> machine and am struggling to learn Linux as well as the old version of Unix.
> 
> To explore some of the options, I need to download a tape from the SCO system
> to the RH7; same tape drive (Seagate Python).  However, when I try 'tar -xvf
> /dev/st0' the tape drive starts to whirl, then  RH informs me that 'this does
> not look like a tar achive' then exits.  
> 
> Any suggestions?  I REALLY NEED the data that is on this tape.

I'm sure other people on this list will have better ideas as to how to go
about this, but here's my idea for this particular problem.

Can you get the data off of tape onto an SCO machine with enough space for
the archive?  If you can get the data off onto one of your present SCO
boxes, you can re-tar it as a file and then transfer the file over the
network to the linux box and attempt to un-tar it there.  That gets rid of
the hassle of having to configure the tape drive under linux, at least. 

Don't know if you've tried this already - I hope it helps.  

Kevin