Tape formatting....

[Mike Barron]

his might sound like a stupid question, but I'm trying to format a DLT IV Tape and can't figure out for the life of me how... Any feedback would be appreciated...
Mike

[Patrick Wallek]

If you are going to use the tape with native unix utilities like tar, cpio, make_recovery and the like, then there is no formatting needed. Just pop the tape in the drive, make sure it is NOT write protected, and go.

If there is already something written on the tape and you want to re-use it, then just make sure that the tape is rewound, and then do whatever you need to do. The data will be overwritten with the new data.

If you are using some backup program like OmniBack, then I can't speak for that as I don't know it.

More details on exactly what you are needing to use the tape for would be helpful if I haven't answered your question already.

[Mike Barron]

Sorry about the lack of info. I already know about all the other tools to overwrite. what I'm trying to do is erase all the data on the DLT tape because I have to turn it back in to HP as part of a refund. I don't want to send it back with data on it.

[Patrick Wallek]

What you might want to try is something like this:

dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/rmt/#m

This might work. The only other way I know of to erase data on the tape is to expose it to a magnetic field or degausser. We have a degaussing unit here that we use on some of our backup tapes that are getting recycled.

[Timothy Czarnik]

Mike,

You may also be able to use the "mediainit" command.

-Tim

[Carlos Fernandez Riera]

Use:

mt -t /dev/rmt/xm rewind
mt -t /dev/rmt/xm eof.

This write a end of file into the tape.
So you dont need to format tape.