Product

Platform

Intel

Operating system

Windows NT/Windows 2000 Server

Error

Symptoms

Cause

Solution

Rawtape is a DOS command utility used to scan the contents of a tape. It can be used to find out the medium header, archive header, job entry file header, file list file header, and the block number of the archived file. You can run Rawtape to verify the archive information on a tape. In some cases, when the customer complains that there is a problem with retrieving data from a tape, you can run Rawtape to verify the bad block data.

Note: You can get a list of commands by typing Rawtape in a DOS prompt.

To run Rawtape:

For a single DLT drive, mount the tape that you want to scan in the drive first. Go to step 2 below.

For a tape library:

1. Use Archiver Media Manager/RSM to mount the tape in the drive.

2. Go to a DOS prompt.

3. Type "rawtape \\.\Tape# -aml > xxx.txt", where:

- # is the number of the drive that the tape containing the archive is mounted in (on a single DLT drive, usually is 0, i.e. \\.\Tape0). To verify the tape #, go to Control Panel\Tape Devices\Properties\General and look for the device map value. (For a tape library, it may have multiple drives such as Tape0, Tape1 and Tape2 --> insert the appropriate device map #)

- a is archive header

- m is medium header

- l is the file list file header

- > xxx.txt is to save the output to a text file

NOTE: Running rawtape is very time consuming; it takes about an hour to scan 10Gb of archived data.

4. When Rawtape is finished scanning the tape, it will return to the DOS prompt.

5. Open up the xxx.txt and scroll to the end to see whether there is any data error (cyclic redundancy check).

6. If there is no error, the tape is fine.

7. If there is a CRC error, there is likely a bad block on the tape. The data that orginally saved in this block will not be retrievable.

8. Manually unmount the tape in the drive when using a single DLT drive, or unmount the tape using Archiver Media Manager/RSM.

9. Mount another drive and repeat the above steps for another tape.

NOTE: Because Rawtape will stop running when it encounters the first CRC error, it can only detect the first CRC error on the tape.

Permanent fix:

See also

Keywords

archiver FAQs

Technical contact(s)

Amy Chan

Submitted by

Amy Chan

Date submitted