A NW4.10 server has been doing it's things in a closet for 11 years and was
almost forgotten until one of the disks crashed yesterday. Not to worry, i
thought, because I had two recent backup's done with arcserve6.1, with
verification tape-to-disk (entire session) without errors. So I installed a
new server with same name, tree-name and context. and put in arcserve 6.0
(OK wrong version, my misunderstanding) and the usual OS patches.

Fair enough, except when I try to restore session2 where my SYS volume is, I
get errors.
after successfully restoring a handful of files (mainly in SYSTEM and
PUBLIC) the message screen gives me "E3168 invalid stream signature" and
"E1056 invalid file header" on hundreds of files. Also one "CRC error".

Strange thing is, the same happens on both the tapes. I upgraded arcserve to
7.0, same result. I also tried to restore to another, somewhat newer,
(NW4.11) server with the same arcserve version as the original server (6.1).
All this was with the original streamer (tandberg 5 GB QIC-based) that wrote
the tapes. I also tried to use a newer streamer with backwards read-only
compatibility.

Always with the same result, E0156 and E3168 after a handful of files.

Obviously this would seem like defective tapes, but one of the files I DID
manage to restore was the arcserve log where I could see that the backup's
had gone without errors every time. So, i was thinking of some software
compatibility issues.. Checked the name spaces, compression=on, restored the
NDS from session 1 first (this actually worked OK)...also tried to restore
data only without trustee rights, without user restrictions and so on...

I'm in it DEEP this time...any ideas are very welcome!