I need to transfer software off a SCO OpenServer 5.0.5 server. I can not seem to read this server's tape on my other server since the tape drive (IBM Gen 5 DAT 72GB) will continuosly "eject" this DAT 8 tape. I have been able to 'tarball' most of the smaller directories with success and transferred these correct. However, I have a huge directory with numerous sub-directories and a large amount of files. I can not create either a 'tarball' nor a 'cpio file' as each crash with an signal error. What else can anyone suggest?

recommend "tar Cvf nome.tar dirname" this should work unless you had lesss space on hard disk, or a few amount on swap dir, i used this one on very large directories with many subdirs and always works fine, hope you can

Tar to a file (tar Cvf nome.tar dirname) is commonly called "tarball." As I have posted, both tar and cpio will not complete. The following occurs during the process:

Signal 31 - core dumped
# dfspace
/ : Disk space: 11026.95 MB of 17389.48 MB available (63.41%).
/stand : Disk space: 5.01 MB of 14.99 MB available (33.44%).

Total Disk Space: 11031.97 MB of 17404.48 MB available (63.39%).
#
The file created:

-rw------- 1 root sys 1073741312 Apr 25 11:03 file.tar


What can I do now?

ok sorry about that, didn't know tarball as a tar command line, but it looks like you have space problems, i suggest you tar a few files, backup and erase the file and tar the nex according to the space that it's on hdd, another though possible it's that there are damadeg sectors on the hdd, when the tar file it's on creation goes to the bad sectors and it breaks, maybe should backup small pieces good luck, it could be better to get a tape to backup or over the net pass small files with created with tar, hope to guide or help you

As you can see, the fiile (1073741312 Apr 25 11:03 file.tar) does not appear to be complete. The file system still has room:

# dfspace
/ : Disk space: 11026.95 MB of 17389.48 MB available (63.41%).
/stand : Disk space: 5.01 MB of 14.99 MB available (33.44%).

Total Disk Space: 11031.97 MB of 17404.48 MB available (63.39%).

So I do not believe that the system is out of room.

That's pretty short beneath one gigabye. Maybe you are not allowed to create such a big file (quota, ulimit) or your filesystem is unable to do so? (I don't use SCO, just a guess with a typical problem) To test it: can you