Tape volume

[Taras_2]

How to know a volume of tape for mounting it?

[Antoniov.]

Hi Taras,
you cannot know a tape volume label before mount it.

You can proceed as follow:
1) Mount in foreign mode
$ MOUNT mytape_dev: /FORE
or else mount ignoring volume
$ MOUNT mytape_dev: /OVER=ID
2) Show tape device characteristic
$ SH DEV mytape_dev:
You can see voume label.
If you will read into a variable (i.e. executing a batch) you can di:
$ MYVAR_LABEL=F$GETDVI("mytape_dev","VOLNAM")
(Warning: VOLNAM is uppercase!; not colon after mytape_dev)
If tape is not readable or it's a new formatted tape, label is blank.
3) Now you can dismount tape without eject
$ DISM mytape_dev: /NOUNLOAD
Volume you can read with previous example is VMS label (max 6 characters) not ANSI label.

Hope This Help
Antoniov

[Robert Atkinson]

If you have a robotic library with bardcode scanning, you could use tapes with permanent barcode labels.

The library would then know what each tape was, and could pass this to the VMS robot software for interigation by you.

Technically, you would then know what the volume was before having to mount it!

Robert.