Restoring DAT tapes with IRIX tar

Today I started to recover a lot of old DAT tapes of an old video software. At first time I tried with IRIX Backup/Restore Manager but gave me a lot of errors due this tapes were stored with an old release of IRIX.

As you can see in this post in the Nekochan forums, the IRIX GUI system changed its own format with the different IRIX versions:

For 6.5, the format is cpio.
For 6.3 and 6.4, the format is tar.
For 5.3-6.2, the format is bru.

As my tapes were burn in 1996/1997 I tried with tar. And success:

# mkdir /datrest
# cd /datrest
# tar xvR

With the above commands all the files in a DAT drive will be restored on the /datrest folder. Just What I needed!

Still kicking!! O2 & Octane & DAT

Still alive!!!
A lot of time without post anything but I am a very busy guy.

First of all here you are my last toy:

A SGI O2 with RM5200 at 300 MHz and 256 MB of RAM. Not bad. I was searching one of this for some years. Running good except for temporary ethernet problems.

Hinv:
O2 2# hinv -mv
CPU: MIPS R5000 Processor Chip Revision: 10.1
FPU: MIPS R5000 Floating Point Coprocessor Revision: 10.0
1 300 MHZ IP32 Processor
Main memory size: 256 Mbytes
Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 1 Mbyte on Processor 0
Instruction cache size: 32 Kbytes
Data cache size: 32 Kbytes
FLASH PROM version 4.18
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version ADAPTEC 7880
Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0 (unit 1)
CDROM: unit 4 on SCSI controller 0
Integral SCSI controller 1: Version ADAPTEC 7880
On-board serial ports: tty1
On-board serial ports: tty2
On-board EPP/ECP parallel port
CRM graphics installed
Integral Ethernet: ec0, version 1
Iris Audio Processor: version A3 revision 0
PCI Adapter ID (vendor 0x9004, device 0x8078) PCI slot 1
PCI Adapter ID (vendor 0x9004, device 0x8078) PCI slot 2
Video: MVP unit 0 version 1.4
AV: AV1 Card version 1, Camera not connected.
Vice: TRE

In the other side, I upgraded the Octane 2 with new harddisk and a Sony DAT unit. Now I'm recovering some ols tapes of Video Software.

And related to my projects, I compiled a new ROM for my Cobalt servers but I still having problems loading large bz2 kernels. This new ROM uses one of the latest 2.4 kernels with SATA_VIA driver and detects a cheap SATA VIA PCI card in my RaQ 4. Unfortunately I don't have enough time and the development is going very slow. I expect to power on one RaQ next month to compile an smaller kernel for this ROM and try to load big kernels again.