Fish wrote:
Harold Grovesteen wrote:
Just curiosity
I realize there seems to be some heritage involved in
all of this, but does anyone know which tool creates
the garbage?
[...]
I also seem to recall there was some (also buggy) tool
oncbttape.org (I forget which one; some conversion tool
I think? Something about 80 byte records?) that would
also cause it to happen. But I'm not 100% certain of
that since it was so long ago.
Found it! It's called VTT2DISK.
It's on one of the CBT tapes.
Sam Golob wrote an article on it in some mainframe magazine as I recall.
Just do a Google on "VTT2DISK" and you'll find several relevant hits.
ANYWAY... As I said in my previous reply, my "AWSFixTape" tool can easily fix these bad tapes.
When using AWSFixTape, I *strongly* suggest NOT specifying a wildcard filename (to fix multiple tapes at once). Instead, I strongly suggest fixing each tape individually one by one, by specifying the exact filename.
The easiest(?) way to tell whether a tape if broken or not (contains trailing garbage or not) is to use my AWSBrowse product to try and open/view the tape. If it's broken, AWSBrowse will report it (and then ignore the garbage and only show you the valid data).
If it's broken, then simply use AWSFixTape to fix it.
Hope that helps!
--
"Fish" (David B. Trout)
Software Development Laboratories
mail: fish@...
