You may experience an error when attempting to ready your media. For example, if you try to use CPIO you may receive the error: "not in cpio format." If you try to read a TAR formatted archive, you might receive the error: "I/O error on device name."
In either case, use the following command to do an ASCII dump of the first part of the data:
od -c device | more
If you see the word "AMEK" in the dump, you may be able to correct the problem with the "dd" utility.
For CPIO archives, use the following command:
dd if=device bs=10b conv=swab | cpio -icvBd
For TAR formatted archives, use the following command:
dd if=device bs=20b conv=swab | tar -xvf -