Format LTO7 as M8 in Storeopen

[nigel gourley]

We have a standalone HP 30750 LTO 8 - so no bar code reading..  New unformatted LTO7 tape. So How do we format M8  or not.. It seems to be random in our case.. I can't see anything that decides this in the software.

[Curtis_Ballard · Accepted solution]

LTO-7 tapes are initialized as Type M if they have M8 in the last two characters of the barcode the first time they are loaded into an LTO-8 tape drive in a tape library.  It is the tape library reading the barcode and configuring the tape drive to initialize the tape as Type M that sets everything up.  If you are using a standalone tape drive then a tape that is already Type M will stay Type M but new LTO-7 tape drives will be initialized as LTO-7.

See the whitepaper for more information:

https://assets.ext.hpe.com/is/content/hpedam/documents/a00039000-9999/a00039948/a00039948enw.pdf

Page 3 talks about initializing the tapes: "You can only initialize LTO-7 Type M cartridges in an LTO-8 library that supports LTO-7 Type M."