Problem with dbexport (Help !!)

Hello Net People: I have a weird problem with a dbexport file and I need help. A couple of days ago I received a 4 mm tape containing a dbexport of a clientxs database. When I tried to import it everything went fine for a while, **BUT** in the middle of the recovery of a big (500.000+ records) table I received an ugly message "Invalid character in date-time field" (or something like that) and the import ended right there. After playing a little while with dbexport and failing miserably all the times I decided to cheat. I copied the tape content to disk using cat /dev/dat > client.exp and jumped into the file with one of our in-house gigabyte-file editors. Surprise, surprise. The file had "holes." (i.e. missing portions). However, for some reason dbimport was able to read those portions (until it failed, of course) and cat was not. If someone out there knows how to copy a dbexport from tape to disk please let me know how to do it. Regards Alex Barragan K-RAM Corp. (404) 991-9600 e-mail almamater@aol.com