Formating the tape

[kunjuttan]

Hi all,

I need to format a L4 tape using hp-ux comand.May I know how can I achieve the same.I am having a tape library MSL2024 with one drive in it.

[Steven Schweda]

> I need to format a L4 tape [...]

What, exactly. does "format a tape" mean to
you, and why do you think that you need to do
it? Is there some actual problem which you
are trying to solve?

[Patrick Wallek]

Tapes normally don't need to be formatted.  If you are writing to the tape with any of the default HP-UX utilities (tar, dd, fbackup, cpio) any data already on the tape will be overwritten.

Some backup utilities **MAY** require some sort of format operation, but that is usually just writing something to the tape header.