HP 3000 Manuals

FCOPY Reference Manual

Copying Foreign Tapes 

Tapes written on foreign machines often have to be read on HP 3000
systems.  If you don't know the exact data format, here are some ideas
that might help you determine what it is. 

   1.  Mount the tape on your HP 3000 (without a write ring).  The
       automatic volume recognition message tells you if it is labeled,
       and if so, what the label is.  If the tape is ANSI-labeled, the
       character data is probably in ASCII, but if the tape is
       IBM-labeled, the character data is almost certainly in EBCDIC.

   2.  Use FCOPY to dump one or two blocks of data from the tape.  If the
       data is likely to be EBCDIC characters, then use EBCDICIN. For
       example, if the tape was reported as "Vol 000001,IBM", you could
       do this:

            FILE L;DEV=TAPE;LABEL=000001,IBM;REC=-16384,1,U,ASCII 

            FILE LP;DEV=LP 

            FCOPY FROM=*L;TO=*LP;OCTAL;CHAR;EBCDICIN;SUBSET=,1 

       This reads one block from the tape, converts it to ASCII, formats
       it as both octal and characters, and prints it, telling you how
       big it is.  The tape records may be blocked, and examination of
       the data will probably disclose a pattern of repetitions from
       which the blocking factor can be deduced.  This is necessary more
       often with unlabeled tapes or IBM-format labeled tapes, which may
       not have the HDR2 records that give the record and block size.

   3.  Once you know the format of the data, use FCOPY to copy the data
       to where you want it--for example, to disk.  Suppose that the
       above tape is found to have blocks of 2640 bytes, consisting of 20
       records of 132 bytes.  You could do the following:

            FILE LL;DEV=TAPE;LABEL=000001,IBM;REC=-132,20,F,ASCII 

            FILE IBMDATA;REC=-132,F,ASCII;DISC=12000,32 

            FCOPY FROM=*LL;TO=*IBMDATA;NEW;EBCDICIN 

       You need an estimate of the amount of data on the tape.  If you
       underestimate, the disk file fills up and FCOPY terminates,
       leaving some data unread.  If you overestimate, you waste some
       disk space, but you can reduce the amount wasted if you specify a
       large number of extents (32 in the example).


NOTE  If you are translating data from EBCDIC to ASCII, use the EXCLUDE
      option to ensure that "Packed Fields (comp-3)" are not translated.
      For more information, refer to the SUBSET function.

MPE/iX 5.0 Documentation