Viewing and Saving Blocks from a Tape
Media Merge PC (MMPC) has built in tools to examine, save, print any block on a tape. Any tape in any SCSI tape drive may be examined and a block selected by entering the filemark number, and the block number. The block (of any size up to 2MB) is then displayed, and may be printed, or saved to hard disk. The display is in ASCII or EBCDIC with a full hex dump.
The logical format of the tape is irrelevant, and so it is possible to view tapes in the raw data format. For security reasons, as well l as practical reasons, it is not possible to change the contents of a tape being viewed. To use, just enter the file number, and block number to be viewed. It is also possible to select different tape partitions for tapes that have been formatted with multiple partitions.
Main features related to viewing tapes
- Views any block up to 2MB, i.e. greater than 64K (subject to hardware)
- Automatic determination of block size
- A block may be dumped to a file on the hard disk
- Very simple to use
- Supports all SCSI tape drives, DAT, Exabyte, 3480, LTO etc.
- Supports optical disks
- Blocks, or parts of blocks may be printed as a Hex dump
To read blocks of more than 64K it is necessary to have suitable hardware. Some SCSI boards limit the transfer size to 64K, and Windows 95/98/NT require a special memory block of contiguous memory. There is often a limitation of about 400K. For PIO SCSI boards, such as AHA1520 and AHA1460, there is no limit, and MM/PC will handle up to about 2MB.