tar error unrecoverable?

[Colin Law]

On 25 January 2014 12:10, Curt Tresenriter <ctres at grics.net> wrote:
> ...
> Meaning... When I attempted (failed being implied here) to copy back to it's original
> home is when the error occurred. The result was 3GB of the file
> transferred before Nautilus reported the IO error.

If you are getting an error when you copy the file then it is nothing
to do with tar, the problem is reading the original or writing the
copy and is probably a hardware issue of some sort.

>
> To me your sentence seems to say the file was on the original disc when
> the error occurred but I probably misunderstood that too.
>
> example 2 & 3
>
> They both seem to me to be the same.
> I guess I'm not sure if it was a read or a write error.
>
> It was during my attempt (again, failure is implied?) to copy it back to
> the original disc that the error occurred - I thought it was obvious
> that the error was that it would not write but I see it may have been in
> reading that it choked.
> How to tell?


You should be able to tell from the error which disc it was trying to
access when it failed.  There may well be something in
/var/log/syslog.

>
> Maybe the file was corrupt from the beginning - ie. immediately after
> originally archiving?
>
> example 4
>
> I didn't try to unpack when it was on the original disc - either
> before or after copying. It was during the attempt to copy from 2nd
> disc to first when the error happened.

In your very first post you said that it was when trying to unpack it
that it failed, now you seem to be saying that it first failed during
copy operations.

Colin