Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:33:58 -0400 From: Jerry McAllister <jerrymc@msu.edu> To: Jaime <jaime@snowmoon.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Formatting a tape? Message-ID: <20090319183357.GA67767@gizmo.acns.msu.edu> In-Reply-To: <ae4324ed0903190915u5a9ac68fw170f38354323e72e@mail.gmail.com> References: <ae4324ed0903190915u5a9ac68fw170f38354323e72e@mail.gmail.com>
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On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 12:15:48PM -0400, Jaime wrote: > I have a DLT tape drive in a FreeBSD system. With one of the tapes, I > can get "tar -cvpf /dev/sa0 -C / ." to work. With all the other > tapes, I can't. > > Is there some kind of formatting process that I need to do? I tried > "mt fsf 1" from this page: > > http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/backups-tapebackups.html > > This didn't seem to work, though. Tapes do not need to be formatted, though the issue mentioned in the page you indicate can cause problems. I have seen it a lot on DAT (DDS) tapes and never with a DLT. On the DAT tapes, the solutions given on that page have usually not helped for me. But, since I have never had any problem with DLT tapes, I can't say if they might be helpful. You can try writing a block or two to the drive using dd(1). That occasionally helped with the DAT (DDS) tapes. dd count=10 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/nsa0 Seems like it should have a bs=nn in there too, but I can't remember if the default of 512 is OK or not. ////jerry > > Any help is appreciated, > Jaime > > -- > "To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts." -- > Henry David Thoreau > > Tone of voice in email is misunderstood 50% of the time. > Source: http://www.howtoweb.com/cgi-bin/insider.pl?zone=214061 > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"
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