To take what Don says a step further; there are many tape-copy utilities (Innovation's FATSCOPY, Opentech's as Don plugged, IBM's own Tivoli Tape Optimizer, and CA's CA-1/Copycat and TLMS/Copycat) that understand that the DCB information stored in the HDR1 may or may not be correct and take that into account when coping these files.
I have not tried using one of the IEBGENER replacements however (ICEGENER from IBM or BetterGener from Syncsort). It would be interesting to see if they also know enough to ignore the HDR1 DCB information and just read the data raw. That might be a question for Frank if he notices this posting. Russell Witt CA-1 Level-2 Support Manager -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Don Bolton Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2007 1:05 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Virtual Tape ??? Mark, Bruce Black has given an excellent explanation (as usually does) of the facts about DFDSS and FDR backup tapes, you could also add HSM and a few others(block size in the label is not what written on the tape). The Opentech Systems TapeCopy product can copy and stack these tapes because TapeCopy uses EXCP code to copy tapes block for block. The copy will have the same number and size as the original, block for block. Check out TapeCopy via the following link; http://www.opentechsystems.com/tape-copy.php Don ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
