Hi, Kenneth!
Trying to kill the keyboard, Kenneth M. Howlett
([EMAIL PROTECTED]) produced 1,8K in 46 lines:
(BTW, your quoting is ... bad. It's very very hard to see
who wrote what. Let me correct that ... there, much better!
Now, the rag-tag-lines of the quoted material ... just reformat
the paragraph ... yep, better!)
> [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
> Erasing a tape is easier and faster than formatting a tape.
He has an IDE-tape (which does not need -- in fact, cannot
*use* -- ftape). These tapes do not need preformatting as
they don't emulate floppies.
> For some tape drivers you do not need to erase the tape because
> the tape driver automatically deletes any data that you
> overwrite.
Actually, any tape drive does that. The only question is
if the driver allows overwriting. Usually the driver should
only allow writing right at the EOD [end of data] (appending)
or at BOT [begin of tape] (overwriting).
> 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.
Most of the time only root has access to the tape drive (and
you can physically set your tapes to readonly!), so that
should be OK. root is allowed to do dangerous things. :-)
> I use ftape 4.02 and it does not allow
> me to overwrite data.
Even if you are at BOT?
> The program 'mt' can erase tapes.
For floppy tapes, it wipes the directory (yep, they have such
a thing), for other tapes, it probably just writes an EOD mark
(2 file marks).
But then you have ftmt (expanded for floppy tapes) and mtst
(for scsi), and then there is mt-dds as an add-on for some
dds features also covered in mtst :-)
> for mt. mt should work for all tape drives.
Yes.
> 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.
Yes. The whole idea of vtbl (said 'directory') is completely
alien to normal tapes. As is pre-formatting :-)
-Wolfgang
