VXA tape problem

I am a frequent user of VXA drives. Our facility performs hundreds of
tape backups per year. I have a tape that was made in 2003 using
Retropect (as all our backups). the tape is a V17 and was made on a
SCSI VXA-1. I have tried to restore the contents on a VXA-2 and
VXA-1. Neither drive or the backup set can recognize the tape. The
tape, upon insertion into the drive, simply plays forward until a
message appears in Retrospect "tape not recognizable". I have also
used a secondary backup copy of the backup set to see if that was the
problem, it was not. I suspect the directory is bad on the tape. But
there are no utilities to fix a tape directory only methods to fix
backup set. Are there resources available to fix and restore bad
tapes, whether it be in software or a media recovery company? Please
advise.

Thanks,
Mike

In article ,
wrote:
backup set. Are there resources available to fix and restore bad
tapes, whether it be in software or a media recovery company? Please
advise.

If the format of the object (directory etc) you need to repair is
documented then you can dump the tape to a file via dd, use a binary editor
or absolute debugger to modify that object(s), then dump the tape back via
dd.

The first thing to try though is to read the tape on the very same
device used to write it. Is that one still available?