Jim Marshall wrote:
I have some IBM 3590 cartridges, J & K, which I need to ensure all the data
is off of them. Does any know of any utility which will write binary zeros
all down the cartridge until the end. I still have an old program from the
US Air Force which would go down to the end two tapemarks, skip over them
and write binary zeros out to the end. This worked well on ugly round tape
and I do not remember if I tried it on cartridges. I would have probably
specified TRTCH=NOCOMP to override compressing all them zeros. I have no
clue what compression would do for things if I tried it on IBM 3590s.
I suggested that we just degauss the cartridges and write a new label. My
SYSPROGs seem to think IBM maintains some cartridge statistics internal to
the cartridge itself and these would be lost.
Any guidance would be appreciated on this.
1. Do not degauss the tapes, unless you want to destroy them. 3590's
have servo tracks tah would be destroyed.
2. 3590 drive can erase the tape without getting any datastream from
host. This feature is exploited by tape manegement systems like RMM or
CA-1. Do you have any ?
3. If you don't have any TMS, just concatenate some trash data and
IEBEGENER it to the tape. It can be even your photo file transmitted to
the host. JPEG is tend to compress poor, so it would be easy to estimate
number of concatenations required.
Method 2 is better, because it's not error prone and does not involve
any host I/O activity. "binary zeroes" are generated by the drive
itself. Bothe methods require DRIVE & TIME. Probably 20-30 min. per cart.
--
Radoslaw Skorupka
Lodz, Poland
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO
Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
