On Fri, Sep 08, 2006 at 03:45:57PM -0400, Joshua Baker-LePain enlightened us: > Please keep responses on the list. Also, top posting and not trimming > posts are generally frowned upon. > > >Thanks for pointing that out. > > > >I've had so many problems with this, I just assumed this to be another > >strange error and did not even notice the medium not present > >message.... duh!!!!. > > > >Also, I think load is not the right word to use since mt cannot load a > >tape, it must be done manually or by a robot. > > Precisely. Use 'mtx' to have the robot load the tape. After the tape > drive goes through its (automatic) loading cycle, the tape will be ready > for use. 'mt status' can confirm that. Furthermore, at least with my > Overland robot, 'mtx unload' automatically does a 'mt offline' to eject > the tape. So running 'mt' manually is pretty rare, really.
Just for the record, I use mt's load command to pull a tape in that has been previously ejected, but not removed from the drive. After I dump to tape, I eject the tape, but don't physically remove it from the drive. That way if I need to restore a file from last week, it's as easy as mt -f /dev/nst0 load amrecover I eject the tape so that when amdump runs each night, it doesn't read the headers over and over, shortening the life of the tape (since I spool to holding disk all week and flush to tape once a week) and forces me to run another command before I can have a typo erase all of last weeks dumps :-) Matt -- Matt Hyclak Department of Mathematics Department of Social Work Ohio University (740) 593-1263