I am guessing that your Linux box has a 4mm tape drive. Does your Linux box also have a tape drive matching one on the HPUX machine or can you bring a tape drive from the HPUX machine to the Linux box?
I wonder if HPUX fbackup and frecover make tar formatted backups. You could find out by trying to list the files on the tapes using the tar command on the Linux machine.
I would probably use the dd command to extract the data from the 4mm tape and put it raw onto the compatible tape. The challenges here are knowing what HPUX fbackup uses for end-of-file and end-of-tape markers and if that will affect the performance of the dd command.
Here is something to chew on. If your 4mm tape drive shows up on Linux as /dev/st0 and your compatible tape drive shows up on Linux as /dev/st1 then I would initially try something like this.
Code:
dd if=/dev/st0 of=/dev/st1 bs=32768 conv=notrunc,noerror
Note that you will have to look on your tape drive user manuals to see what the block size is for each tape drive. The 'bs=32768' would work for many tape formats but maybe not for yours. I don't know.
If the block size for each tape drive is different then you can specify the block size for each separately as follows.
Code:
dd if=/dev/st0 of=/dev/st1 ibs=<whatever> obs=<whatever> conv=notrunc,noerror
Note that the way that I have written the dd commands will read the tape to the end even if the data stops before the end of the tape. This is okay if the tape that receives the data is the same capacity or larger than the 4mm tape.
I hope that I have given you some useful ideas.
