SUMMARY: Reading IBM EBCDIC Tapes

From: Darren Brechman-Toussaint (DarrenBT@bne.secmail.com.au)
Date: Tue Jul 14 1998 - 01:47:38 CDT


Firstly, many thanks to

Philip Sewell [FIL@netspace.net.au]
Brion Leary [brion@dia.state.ma.us]
EFernandes@talisman-energy.com <mailto:EFernandes@talisman-energy.com>
frost@tsfsrv.mitretek.org <mailto:frost@tsfsrv.mitretek.org>
Dennis Martens [MARTENSD@health.qld.gov.au]
Chris Liljenstolpe [cds@mcmurdo.gov]
David Evans [DJEVANS@au.oracle.com]
John Bradley [john.bradley@sr5.chinalake.navy.mil]
Mark Cain [mcain@mcs.drexel.edu]
Gerald Combs - Unicom Communications [gerald@unicom.net]
David Robson [robbo@box.net.au]

Who offered scripts and different options to try.

Most of the options I had already tried, so I dug a little deeper into
the software on the PC and found that it was converting nulls and other
control chars to PC friendly characters like spaces and carriage
return/line feed pairs thus causing the conversion confusion.

Many Thanks

Darren Brechman-Toussaint
Security Mailing Services

Original Post

>Hi all,
>
>I am trying to read a labelled tape from an IBM machine. I can read it
>in ok but the conversion from EBCDIC to ASCII doesn't work properly.
>
>I can read + convert the header file and it looks like this
>
>VOL1M00132
>
>HDR1EXTR0001.G0011V00M0013200010001001100 981850000000000000IBM OS/VS
>370
>HDR2V279040030040PGUS185W/S005 B
>
>I have been using "dd" to read the tape and also tried "ansitape", but
>"ansitape" doesn't seam to be able to read EBCDIC tapes. It complains
>about not being able to read the header giving "no VOL1 header record".
>
>I know what this file should look like from reading it on a PC with
some
>old software, but the tape drive on the PC is broken at the moment.
>
>I have tried a lot of different options with cbs but not much better
>than just using conv.
>
>If anyone has any other ideas or some software I can try, give me a
>buzz.
>
>System Info:
>E4000
>Sol 2.6
>Tape Drive - Cipher M995



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:12:43 CDT