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I am trying to write a file directly to a tape in my LTO4 tape drive. From what I understand, this should be possible.

However, when I attempt to use dd to write to it (e.g. dd if="/test.img" of=/dev/nst0 bs=1024) it fails. From what I understand from the output, this is because I am not using tar?

dd: error reading '/dev/nst0': Input/output error
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes copied, 0.00600797 s, 0.0 kB/s
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

Is tar absolutely necessary to write to a tape? If not, what am I doing wrong?

The image itself is simply a disk image. Nothing special.

Tape drive information:

Product Type: Tape Drive
Vendor ID: 'HP      '
Product ID: 'Ultrium 4-SCSI  '
Revision: 'A63Z'

If you need any more information, please let me know.

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  • When you tell us you run a command, and run some entirely different command it's difficult to help...
    – vidarlo
    Commented Jun 27 at 7:24
  • I understand. I should have checked before I posted. I plan to mark as answered as soon as the website will let me.
    – anonymousman21
    Commented Jun 27 at 16:27

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I made a stupid mistake. The script I was using has many modes, and I forgot to change the mode for writing to the appropriate setting. So it was attempting to read a tar archive instead.

Whoops!

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