[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Rob Kobiske) said:
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.
Erasing a tape is easier and faster than formatting a tape.
For some tape drivers you do not need to erase the tape because
the tape driver automatically deletes any data that you
overwrite. You can rewind the tape and start writing data, and
the tape is automatically erased. But this is dangerous
because it makes it easy to
accidently overwrite your data, so many tape drivers do not
allow you to overwrite data. If you do not know if your tape
driver allows you to overwrite data, you should try it, so you
will know if you have to be careful to avoid accidently
overwriting your data. I use ftape 4.02 and it does not allow
me to overwrite data.
The program 'mt' can erase tapes. This was included in my redhat
5.0; it should be in all Linux distributions. Read the man page
for mt. mt should work for all tape drives.
There are also a lot of tape tools, which are programs which do
miscellaneous tape functions. Most of these only work for one
kind of tape drive, and I do not know which ones work with your
tape drive. I have the ftape tools package for ftape 4; this
includes 'vtblc', which can erase tapes, and 'ftformat', which
can format tapes; I think these only work with ftape 4.
If all else fails, reboot to DOS or Windows and use the tape
programs which came with your tape drive to erase or format
tapes. Or take your tapes to a different computer which has a
similar tape drive and is already running DOS or Windows.
