10-11-2012
I am not an Solaris expert, but the first error is most definitely a "tape full" error. In disks you have a fixed amount of space you know in advance. So the OS can keep track of the decreasing number of free space during a write operation and once this number hits zero it can tell you "disk full".
There is no such thing with a tape: a tape is of indefinite length (at least from the OS point of view) and therefore of indefinite capacity. For the running tar it is like this: it writes a piece of data, then further winds the tape, then writes the next piece, ... . At the end of the tape the tape drive will tell the OS (tar) that there is no more tape to wind - but for the OS this will be "unexpected", because it can't expect the end of tape like it could expect the exhaustion of disk space.
The second error more looks like a tape error: the magnetic coating of the tape might be damaged or the head of the drive might be dirty or nearing their end-of-life or whatever - the data haven't been written for some reason and it was the fault of something between the tape drive and the tape.
I hope this helps.
bakunin
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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN
dds2index
dds2index(1) General Commands Manual dds2index(1)
NAME
dds2index - tool to create an indexfile for the use of
SYNOPSIS
dds2index [options]
DESCRIPTION
dds2index creates an index file that is required by the file extraction utility dds2tar(1). It works on tar archives stored on dds tape
devices (DAT). Since the file structure of the tape archives is used to extract the files, the archive must be an uncompressed tar ar-
chive. But compression by the transparent signal processor of the tape device is allowed.
The index created by dds2index is written to stdout by default and should normally be stored on hard disk as indexfile for later use by
dds2tar(1).
The default tape device to read from is /dev/nst0, which may be overridden with the environment variable TAPE, which in turn may be over-
ridden with the -f device option. The device must be a SCSI tape device.
OPTIONS
-f devicefile
device of the tape archive. Must be a character special file.
-t indexfile
write the index to indexfile, not to stdout.
-z,--compress
write the index in (gzip) compressed mode.
--help print some screens of online help with examples through a pager and exit immediatley.
OPTIONS you didn't really need
-b, --block-size
Set the maximal blocksize, dds2index can handle.
--z, --no-compress
Don't filter the archive file through gzip.
-v,--verbose
verbose mode. Print to stderr what is going on.
-h,--hash-mode
Print a hash sign '#' to stderr for each MB read from tape.
-V,--version
Print the version number of dds2index to stderr and exit immediately.
EXAMPLES
Example of getting the index from the default tape /dev/nst0 and storing it in file archive.idx:
dds2index -v -t archive.idx
WARNING
This program can only read records (tar is calling them tape blocks) up to 32 kbytes. A bigger buffer will cause problems with the Linux
device driver.
ENVIRONMENT
The environment variable TAPE overrides the default tape device /dev/nst0.
FILES
/dev/nst0 default tape device file. Must be a character special file.
SEE ALSO
dds2tar(1), mt(1), mt-dds(1), tar(1), gzip(1)
HISTORY
This program was created as a tool for dds2tar(1).
AUTHOR
J"org Weule (weule@cs.uni-duesseldorf.de), Phone +49 211 751409. This software is available at ftp.uni-duesseldorf.de:/pub/unix/apollo
2.4 dds2index(1)