(sorry for part of the duplication.) On Fri, 27 Mar 2009 09:05:11 -0500, John Benik <[email protected]> wrote:
>We have the need to erase any residual data on some stacked backend vsm >tapes. I've heard you can do this with FATS/FATAR but wondered if there is >any other method to do this? Everything else I have seen seems to require >the tapes be added to your tape management system and even then there is >some doubt that this will work. > As long as you have a host attached drive of the [1] same type that can read / write to it, you can do it. Some time ago we converted 9840B to 9840C for our VSM back end only and we had to add 1 9840C as a host drive in order to do use FATS/FATAR analysis of bad tapes. It's a good idea to do this anyway in case you have to use any of the secret or documented utilities (like RTV) that need to read the MVC from MVS. [1] 9840A/9840B read/write the same format. Speed is the difference. 9840A/9840B can initialize / erase a tape previously created by 9840C/9840D since the media is the same. I forgot to mention the "tape management" aspect. There is no reason to add the back end tapes if all you want to do is analyze or erase them or whatever. You should be able to treat it as a foreign tape. If course the job / task / user needs authority to do that. Mark -- Mark Zelden Sr. Software and Systems Architect - z/OS Team Lead Zurich North America / Farmers Insurance Group - ZFUS G-ITO mailto:[email protected] z/OS Systems Programming expert at http://expertanswercenter.techtarget.com/ Mark's MVS Utilities: http://home.flash.net/~mzelden/mvsutil.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
