Hi, one last resort would be using a big magnet on the tape and after that relabeling it. But be aware this erases every single bit ever written to the tape. one other thing i would try before is to look at the drive itself and check if there is a hardware switch to turn off compression. Many drives will read happily compressed tapes when compression is disabled, but they will use no compression anymore for writing. At least my STD224000N and the other drives from different vendors i have behave this way.... Christoph
Gene Heskett wrote: > Does anyone here have any idea how one would go about converting > a DDS2 tape that been written by one of these with the DC on to a > format that leaves the DC off? > > The problem is that once written to the tapes headers, it > apparently cannot be switched back off. This appears to be in a > header location on the tape that is not available to the outside > world > > amlabel -f /config/ tapename slot # will dutifully read the old > label if it exists, then rewind and write the new label just > fine, but when it does the verify read after the write, the (*^ > DC led comes right back on. I've even gone so far as to destroy > the existing externally available header data with a dd from > urandom, but this doesn't appear to touch the tape drives own, > maintained on the tape, data. > > I'd like to have a little more control over the storage size of a > tape than this allows, but it appears the only way to convert > back is to toss these tapes and get fresh ones, and I have about > 30 to replace. Ouch... :-( > >
