----- Skylar Thompson wrote: ----- >I could try dd'ing a megabyte of zeros to the beginning of the >tape, but I'd have to stop TSM to do that.
I don't think you have to stop TSM for this. We once needed to use a non-TSM tape utility to download new microcode to our tape drives. We used 'update drive' and 'update path' commands with 'online=no' to take each drive and associated path offline long enough to run the utility. Once a drive was upgraded we used similar commands with 'online=yes' to make the drive and path available to TSM again. All of our drives were upgraded with the TSM server up and running. I am not sure we really needed to take both drives and paths offline. We decided it was easier to do both than toresearch the issue.
