VMS/RSX tape backup problem

[Michael Thompson]

Hi Joe,

I have an 800/1600/6250 bpi HP SCSI tape drive on a Sun system. I have the
tape image tools on the server so I can make PDP10 boot tapes. I should be
able to make *.TAP images of your tapes.

At 09:39 PM 3/14/2005 -0500, you wrote:
>Hi everyone,
>    Well, I am finally getting around to trying to recover some 26 
>9-track tapes I have been holding on to for
>at least 10 years.  Some are closer to 25 years.  I found out six of 
>them had no data, and a bunch more I
>have been able to read and decode, including some RT-11 tapes and some 
>VAX SIG tapes.  Sorry this
>monologue won't make much sense to you non-DEC folks, but you might have 
>ideas on converting from 800
>to 1600 BPI anyway.
>
>Here is my dilemna.  I have 6 tapes that look like they are 800 BPI, and 
>were most likely written on an RSX-11
>system.  I have no 800 BPI setup, and if I did, it would be on a VAX, 
>which may not be able to restore the
>savesets anyway.  That is because I  have a few more tapes that I can 
>read (or at least dump) but I cannot unpack
>the savesets.  It would appear that the tapes were written in the early 
>days of VMS when the backup and restore
>utilities were really RSX-11 BCK/RST derivitives, and the current BACKUP 
>program does not recognize
>the container file as a valid saveset.
>
>The label on the front of several tapes date them early 80's and talks 
>about BCK format. The dump sort of looks
>like BCK stuff.  The blocksize is 2064. 
>
>I've had a couple of offers to try to recover the data, but I was 
>checking to see if anybody was set up to easily
>read and recover the data, without a lot of reconfiguration or hassle.  
>I'm open to suggestions.  I suspect if I knew
>the layout of a BCK container/saveset I could unpack them myself (except 
>for the 800 BPI stuff).  Any ideas??
>
>I also have an XXDP tape, labeled MSDP, which makes me think it is 
>bootable.  It would be nice to duplicate
>it, as it is not easily read to disk.  The first block is 14 bytes, and 
>the rest look like 512 bytes.
>
>And finally, I have a tape that is readable, is mountable under VMS and 
>I can copy nearly everything off of.
>That is, the 400+ files up to the file that is marked HECK.BCK.  That 
>file is  2064 byte blocks, which makes
>me think it is also a BCK/RST format.  Can't figure how I got it on the 
>end of the tape and haven't figured
>out how to get it back.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Joe Heck
>
>

Michael Thompson
E-Mail: M_Thompson at IDS.net