It's easier to recover corrupted media if you know everything about the underlying format and protocols. As an example, I was able to recover a partition that was partially overwritten by just a few sectors by finding a backup copy of the superblock and writing it into the correct place armed only with hexdump and dd. That would have been impossible without detailed info about ext2/3/4 available.
Also look at the floppy imagers people have made, that operate at the magnetic flux level.
> It's easier to recover corrupted media if you know everything about the underlying format and protocols.
Sorry, I'm still not sure how knowing the LTO spec would be helpful.
You are basically asking for the "Layer 1" documentation of how the tape head write to the tape media? Given that you can only access the media via a drive, wouldn't it be sufficient to simply know the SCSI commands (T-10 SSC-x) to send? You'd then have to know the file format of the backup software (e.g., tar).
"That would have been impossible without detailed info about ext2/3/4 available."
Try telling that to IKARI+TALENT, Legend, Skid Row, PaRaDoX and all the other cracking groups from Commodore64, Amiga, ATARI ST, PlayStations, Nintendos, groups which competed on who is going to one-file a program or convert a secret disk coding format to a regular filesystem, with all the protections disabled and the programs bug and NTSC+PAL fixed while they were at it...
nitrogen|6 years ago
Also look at the floppy imagers people have made, that operate at the magnetic flux level.
throw0101a|6 years ago
Sorry, I'm still not sure how knowing the LTO spec would be helpful.
You are basically asking for the "Layer 1" documentation of how the tape head write to the tape media? Given that you can only access the media via a drive, wouldn't it be sufficient to simply know the SCSI commands (T-10 SSC-x) to send? You'd then have to know the file format of the backup software (e.g., tar).
Annatar|6 years ago
Try telling that to IKARI+TALENT, Legend, Skid Row, PaRaDoX and all the other cracking groups from Commodore64, Amiga, ATARI ST, PlayStations, Nintendos, groups which competed on who is going to one-file a program or convert a secret disk coding format to a regular filesystem, with all the protections disabled and the programs bug and NTSC+PAL fixed while they were at it...
doikor|6 years ago
nitrogen|6 years ago