Date: Thu, 27 May 1993 12:42:49 GMT From: "Glenn C. Everhart" To: goathunter@WKUVX1.BITNET Subject: vmstpc Hunter - There has been some discussion of the need for a utility to read tapes with serious bit rot lately, so I finally got round to doing something that's been needed: I added another switch to vmstpc so it can ignore tape errors. It's an override condition, and I have trouble testing it much (don't have any 8mm's around with bitrot) but i thought it might prove handy. If you give it the switch /ERROR it will do its error-ignore thing and pretend all those rotten bits were read OK. As long as your tape drive can skip past the bad areas (not all do), this can give a way to get a copy of what the tape hardware can get off the tape, which can then be put onto a new tape. Hopefully then the new tape can be used to recover some of the data. Without the /ERROR switch it's just Brian Nelson's code, which is probably the fastest way to move data between tape and disk. A tape to tape program that does this kind of thing is of course pretty trivial, but sometimes we don't have two tape drives of the right type to play these games. I'm sending it in hopes it might make it to your fileserver and/or ftp.spc.edu. The ZIP file contains .obj and .exe as well as sources and help. This was written for, and has been used by, tapecopy people for years... Glenn Everhart Everhart@Arisia.GCE.Com (best) Everhart@Raxco.com (ok, but slower) 215 358 5875