Formating a tape

[Rob Kobiske]

Hello,
I have a Hp 10/20gig IDE tape drive and i have it all set up and it works
just fine but i would like to know what i have to do to format or just
erase the tape so when i rotate my tapes i can delete all of what is on
the tape and put the new stuff on the tape.

I am using tar to put stuff on the tape 'tar cf /dev/ht0' and i have it
working under a 2.0.32 kernel with Redhat.

Thanks
Rob Kobiske