Reading VMS-written tapes under UNIX on an Alpha

From: Sreerama Murthy <murthy_at_scr.siemens.com>
Date: Mon, 01 Jul 1996 12:10:15 -0400

We want to read several TK-50 tapes on a DEC Alpha running UNIX connected to
a TZ-87 tape drive. The TK-50 tapes were written using "copy" on VMS.
Each tape contains some images (binary data) plus may be a few header files.

 1. Is it at all possible to recognize/read VMS-written tapes under UNIX on the Alpha?
 2. If so, is it possible for Alpha-Unix to recognize VMS file/directory structure on the
    tape and convert it to a UNIX-readable format? Is there existing software somewhere that
    can do this?
 3. Can the Alpha be partitioned to run both VMS and UNIX? What kind of disk space/time
    overhead would this mean? (More precisely, a brute-force solution to my problem is to boot the
    Alpha under VMS, read the TK-50 tape, switch the machine to run UNIX and then run the code to
    analyze the image data. This solution MAY be practical only if switching from VMS to Unix takes
    less than 5-minutes.)

I would really appreciate quick responses from knowledgeable folks, as we are racing
to meet a deadline. Please e-mail your responses directly to murthy_at_scr.siemens.com.
Thank you.

- Murthy.

-- 
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  Dr. Sreerama K. Murthy			Phone: Off.  609-734-3649
  		       
  Siemens Corporate Research			Fax (SCR):   609-734-6565
  755 College Road East				Email: murthy_at_scr.siemens.com
  Princeton, NJ 08540, USA.			http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~murthy
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*******              All opinions are strictly mine.             ***********
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Received on Mon Jul 01 1996 - 18:33:45 NZST

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