Hi, I have a couple of DC2120EX (QIC-Extra / QIC-80-MC) cartridges by Verbatim that I wouldn't mind using with my Colorado 250mb tape drive... I tried formatting one (since the last time I formatted would have been on a NT machine) using.. titan:/# ftformat --mode=auto --format-parameters qic80-1100ft Tape drive error sending select rate or format command: 8 (Illegal Command in R) Unable to auto-detect tape type. If this is a 205ft cartridge, try again with the "qic80-205ft" option But it gave me that error message. Could it be the Jumbo 250mb tape drive wont support 1000ft tapes? And why does the command say 1100ft when the tape, and the standards on the www.qic.org page say 1000ft? Doing a tape retension seemed to work OK.. also doing a listtape and getsize gave me.. titan:/# listtape -f /dev/qft0 file number block size volume size tape space Remaining space: 382.0 megabytes Tape block size: 10240 titan:/usr/local/bin# ftmt -f /dev/qft0 getsize total bytes on tape = 382.0 megabytes total bytes used = 29.0 kilobytes total bytes left = 382.0 megabytes I just told it to format with the qic80-205ft option and it seems to be formatting OK.. so I guess I've probably just answered my own question and the tape drive can't handle these 400meg tapes? I take it I shouldn't have any problems formatting a 1000ft tape as a 205ft? The rest of the space will be just unused I'm guessing? Thanks, Chris Lee
