On Mon, 23 Oct 2000, Paul Tomblin wrote:
> I just bought a DDS-2 drive to replace my DDS-1 drive (anybody want to buy
> it?). Anyway, I tried one of my 120m tapes that had been used in the
> DDS-1 drive, and it appears that the new drive recognizes the old format
> and won't write to it at the higher density. How can I force it to
> reformat? I don't have a bulk eraser. I tried using "mt setdensity
> DDS-2", but it didn't take.
Try 'mt erase' or 'mt weof', then change your drive settings, then write
some foo and see if it took. I like to do:
$ cat /home/amanda/bin/init32k
#!/bin/bash
mt rewind &&\
mt weof && \
mt setblk 32768 && \
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/nst0 bs=32k count=1000 && \
mt rewind
I use this to change the block size on my drive from its default of 1k
bytes to 32k bytes, which makes my workstation run a lot smoother when
taper is active. Most of my existing tapes are at 1024, so I run this
each night to reset the tape format before Amanda sees it. (I also
amrmtape and amlabel the thing so Amanda's db doesn't get confused.)
Once I cycle through all my tapes, I won't have to do this any longer
since the drive checks a tape for such settings when it loads it.
I use the dd to make sure the whole header is clean, because otherwise
my tape drive is likely to start shoeshining on the tape's physical
header. I don't know why.... It hasn't done it since I started using
the dd, though.
--
Joi Ellis Software Engineer
Aravox Technologies [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
No matter what we think of Linux versus FreeBSD, etc., the one thing I
really like about Linux is that it has Microsoft worried. Anything
that kicks a monopoly in the pants has got to be good for something.
- Chris Johnson
