I have a TR-3 EX tape with bad spots at the beginning where the volume table is supposed to be. There are bad spots in other places too, but they can be skipped; the bad volume table is more serious because it can not be skipped. It usually takes three or four passes to read or write the volume table; sometimes it succeeds in one pass and sometimes it takes as many as ten passes. This tape is an MEI Premium; I think it is a Verbatim in disguise. You do not need to tell me I should be buying high quality tapes instead of cheap tapes; I have already learned that lesson the hard way. But can I still get some use from this bad tape? Would it help if I reformatted this tape to a lower capacity, 1.1 gigabytes (uncompressed) instead of 2.2 gigabytes? I think that would be MC3010 format instead of MC3020 format. Or maybe some other format? If the low capacity format uses more tape surface for each bit of data, it might be less affected by bad spots. But if the low capacity format uses the same amount of tape surface for each bit, with more blank space between bits, then it might not make any difference. If I disassembled the tape cartridge and swapped the two spools, so that the tape was reversed and the volume table gets written to the other end of the tape, would that help? If I cut off the end of the tape and throw it away, would that help? How would I figure how much tape to cut off? I heard a rumor that there is a hole near the end which marks the end; would it be easier to just make a new hole, and let the tape drive think the rest of the tape did not exist? I see in the FAQ there is some information about which brands of tapes are best, but the information is five years old. Has anyone tested different brands of tapes recently and figured out which are best? The ftape 4.02 documentation says that it is better to use a fixed block size than variable block size, because ftape can skip around faster, and the C functions work better. But if I am not programming in C, and I do not care about speed, is there any other reason why I should not use variable block size? Does it affect how much data can be written to the tape, how well it can recover corrupted data, or how much it wears the tape?
