I'm attempting to read a tape in a 4mm drive (AIX 4.3) using the following command...

...and I keep getting the following error message:

I've googled this error message and found many sources (including this thread on this site) that indicate it is a problem with the block size on the tape being different from the block size on the drive. However, I've tried changing the block size on the drive to 0 (variable), 512, and 1024, using this command...

, and nothing is working. When I set the block size to 512 or 1024, the2second line of the error message changes to this:

I'm afraid the drive might be broken, but I'm hoping someone might have some other suggestions for me. If I haven't included enough info, let me know.

TIA

I am not an expert but I read 4mm tapes alot. The command I use to read them is
tar -tvf /dev/rmt/0n

Hope this helps.

You can easily find the block size with the following commands.

#Change the block size to variable
chdev -l rmt0 -a block_size=0

#Read one huge block
dd if=/dev/rmt0 of=/tmp/testblock bs=128k count=1

#Find the block size with wc
wc -c /tmp/testblock

And there you have the blocksize.