Hi Guys

I'm trying to read tapes written on an old AIX machine in a USB tape drive on my unix machine.

I can't seem to mount the drive, and no one can tell me what filesystem these tapes are running. We can can read them in a Sun Solaris box, but not via linux. apparently these things were automounted by the AIX box and the sun box, and AFAIK the main filesystem on the old AIX boxes was JFS and USFS: JFS gives me no joy and my kernel (2.6.2 i think).

i don't think you can just tar a file to a raw volume, but if that's possible, they might have done that.

anyone got anyideas how i can mount this puppy?

A tape drive can not be mounted and does not have a filesystem per se. What application do you use to read the tapes from the Sun box?

You can try using tar in some empty directory to test the drive.
tar -xvf /dev/st0

Hey man, the direct tar -xvf worked like a charm.
guess i was stuck in a mindset of mounting stuff.

thanx

and suddenly tar -xvf doesn't work anymore...

stability? what's that?

i tried to extract to a directory and it didn't work - now nothing works...
device is still there, i just can't access it

Error messages?

unable to locate device - does not exist

Make sure the USB modules are still loading.

USB modules are loading and if i do lsusb it shows me the device - just can't access it on this system. on my other PC it works fine. might be hardware failure