I have a tape from an SGI (Irix 5.1-6.0?) that I don't have anymore. Can Mandrake do like a RAW tar dump? I have no idea what the write block size was.

I keep getting a "cannot read: Input/Output error"

I've tried to do some block size command line conversions but can't seem to get anything to work.

This has been driving me nuts for some time now. Some web sites say it's impossible to read SGI tapes on Linux/PC's, others say just do this: (insert confusing linux command here) and voilà!

Nothing ever works for me. I have MAndrake 9.2 downloaded version.

Anything will help. Thanks.

Have you tried the dd command?

dd if=/dev/st0 of=<file_name> bs=512 count=2

Like you said block size could be anything. Count = 2 will copy to 512 byte blocks.

Thanks for the help but that didn't work either. There is a slight chance BRU was used on this tape. Is there a simple way to install bru?