Re: What can I do with an unloaded partitioned data set on Linux?
On Thu, 01 May 2008 15:50:09 +0000, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> I am the proud owner of several unloaded partitioned data sets, dating
> back to my days on OS/360 and OS/370.
>
> Does anyone have any code I could use to decode these? I don't mean the
> EBCDIC-to-ASCII (or to UTF-8) conversion -- I mean the weird file format.
>
> Or documentation about this file format?
>
> Or will I have to reverse-engineer it myself? Not that that's likely to
> be an insurmountable task. I just suspect that somewhere, someone has
> already done it.
>
> -- hendrik
>
>
OK. It looks as if I will reverse-engineer the file format. Based on what
I've seen here, and looking at the file, it doesn't look too difficult --
simpler than installing OS/360 on an emulator, anyway!
Except -- my investigations last night indicate that my archive is damaged
-- all the 800-byte blocks have been truncated to 512 bytes. Not much
even an emulator can do about that, at least until I locate another copy
somewhere.
Funny -- of all the tapes I've archived this way, this is the *only* one
that's suffered damage. I doubt that OS/370 would have cheated me on
block size. The 512-byte size seems like a Unixism to me.
I'll have to find a 9-track tape reader before I can proceed.
Thanks.
-- hendrik
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