On Wed, 25 Jan 2017, Eric Smith wrote: > > The problem: > > They then accidentally overwrote the start of the tape yesterday > > with about 1 KB of data, plus EOT. > > I hope someone can prove me wrong, but I think that short of a major effort > to hack the drive firmware, the data is gone. Modern tape drives are "too > smart" to allow reading past logical EOT, and the tape format is too > complex to allow fooling the firmware by any simple means.
ISTR being able to successfully do `mt fsr' after `mt eod' with a DDS-4 drive and `mt tell' returned sensible status afterwards, so chances are it might work. It might depend however on the particular drive, OS and version of `mt' as there seem to be several implementations around; maybe also whether firmware-driven data compression has been used. Plus my memory may be fooling me as it's been years since. I think it's surely worth trying though, as there's nothing to lose. Maciej
