Need to retreive files from an old NCR unix box

cpio and dd are two utilities that should work for you. If you have already tried these and other apps, list them. Others may have better alternate suggestions.

no luck with cpio it just errors and I was unfamilar with dd so I typed the command in the system to see what would happen and it just locked up.  I tried to use the sysadm utility but the tape drive is not listed as a device in there, and I didn't see a way to add it.  I've also tried tapectrl with no luck.

If you know where the tape is (/dev/device name), you can use dd as

dd if=input file of=/dev/tape bs=blocksize that is acceptable to the device

If the system does not recognize the tape drive, you may have to use the floppy

if you have to copy to a floppy split the file using
split or csplit commands

once copied cat can concatenate the split files

A lot of common unix commands seem to lock the system up.  You suggested to use split to split the file into smaller chunks, so I went over to the box to see if the command was recognized.  I just typed split into the console, but the cursor moves to the next line but it never gives me an error or returns the prompt, it just sits there.  It did the same thing when I typed dd.  Is there anything I can do to get the prompt back?  The system is still responsive, but not error or prompt, the cursor just blinks on the next line.  

the csplit command appears to work, how would I go about using that command to split the file up into 1.44MB sized peices, then how do I use the cat command to get one file again?

use the following syntax for split

split --bytes=1M OrigFile SplitFile

1M splits the file into 1 MB chunks
OrigFile is the name of original file
SplitFile is the prefix for all files created

to get your OrigFile, use
cat SplitFile* > OrigFile
on the new machine

To use csplit you need some info about the files, which may not be practical in this case.

well split locks up the machine so csplit is my only option.  What file info will I need?

You need to know the type of file you are dealing with and any reasonable pattern that you can use to split the files by.

web links:
http://www.mkssoftware.com/docs/man1/csplit.1.asp
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/UserInfo/Resources/Hardware/IBMp690/IBM/usr/share/man/info/en_US/a_doc_lib/cmds/aixcmds1/csplit.htm

split an dd do not lock up the system: If you do not provide parameters, these utilities will read from stdin -- just sitting there and waiting for input. You should be able to end it with either - or or by ending EOF pressing -

Try to check your tape
  mt status
or
  mt /dev/rct0 status

What potential tape device files do you see?
  ls /dev/r[cm]t?

Also, SCSI tape device should be like this
   ls /dev/rmt/c*

Hardware config can be displayed, using
   prtconf
or reading file .osm
   more /etc/.osm

Well as it turns out I had to get a lot more data off than previously expected.  I managed to connect a 50 pin SCSI hard drive to the box and get it mounted and the data copied over to it.  Before I knew I had to connect the hard drive to the box I was able to get some data off using a floppy disk that I formatted using the s5 filesystem.  I was then able to put that floppy disk into a box running Ubuntu and read the data off it.  However when I try to mount the hard drive that has the same file system I get errors about bad superblock.  Does anyone know if a hard drive that was partitioned and sliced in UNIX can be mounted on a box running Ubuntu?