Hi all--
I've seen a couple of these messages about tape drives go by, and
I've been a bit too busy to respond.
A while back I did a bit of work on getting some mt ops working. It
was pretty easy, but I ran into trouble with figuring out conventions
on writing filemarks (basically whenever a write operation 'ends' in
some sense a filemark is written; if the write is ended by a write
filemark, how many filemarks are written? Unfortunately the answer is
1 or 2 depending on the driver: try it sometime with and ide drive
using the ide driver and the ide-scsi driver). At least this is the
confusion as I remember it.
I had a patch that I posted to the list way back in early 2.2, but I
think I screwed up the patch. I will think about resurrecting it in a
couple of weeks when I get the time.
On Thu, 20 Jul 2000, Laurence John Oliver wrote:
> Thanks to the help/info from several people on this list I *finally*
> have my HP Colorado 5GBe tape drive working (i.e. backing up okay) - but
> the lack of any utils to use with it (it is ATAPI and things like
> ftape-tools/etc. won't work with it) means that I'm still at a loss on
> how to; ERASE, REWIND, etc...
>
> For ERASE, someone has suggested:
>
> 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/pt0 bs=8192'
>
> THIS command is *definitely* doing SOMETHING - but whatever its doing,
> its been going for about two hours already and I'm wondering how long it
> will take and if there is any way to use this command in a 'verbose
> mode' so I can get some sort of status report/update from it...
You're writing zeros to the whole tape, and this isn't the fastest
device ever made (the parallel port interface doesn't help either).
You could try a 32k block size, but that probably won't help. Is
there a reason you want to erase the tape? It's not necessary in most
cases.
As for rewinding, if you used /dev/pt0, the tape was rewound after you
closed it last. If you used /dev/npt0, look into the mt command: the
one mt op that does work is rewind if memory serves.
> Also hoping that I'm not actually doing any damage to the tape (?)
Nope, harmless enough.
-- J. Scott Berg jsberg@earthlink.net 75 ROCKY POINT YAPHANK RD APT 122 (631) 209-0693 ROCKY POINT NY 11778-8470-- To unsubscribe, send mail to: linux-parport-request@torque.net -- -- with the single word "unsubscribe" in the body of the message. --
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Jul 19 2000 - 23:53:39 EDT