OBDR - tape header format ?

[Alex Owen]

Hello,
I have just spent a couple of hours looking on the hp site and googling
for details of the OBDR tape format. Is there any HP docs on this? if so
how can I get hold of them. I'm interested in developing an open source
Linux OBDR solution.
I have seen mkcdrec project and there is probably enough info in that to
do what I want... But it would be nice to get the info from the
cananocal source (ie: HP!)

From the mkcdrec scripts it seems that 20 blocks of zero's followed by a
bootable cdrom iso image is the signature the drive looks for.

On initial inspection I'm not sure if a tape file mark should come
between the 20 blank blocks or not. Elsewhere I have seen a reference
that suggests that the initial 20 blocks can contain anything one cares
to place in them... Has anyone got any info on this? or pointers to any HP specs?

Regards
Alex Owen

[Alex Owen]

Is US patent 6701450 B1 the only public doc then?

I guess that puts a stop to developing an opensource OBDR solution!?!

Hmm... has HP made a patent pledge along the lines of RedHat yet?
http://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html

[Marino Meloni_1]

OBDR media needs to have a specific format to be recognised by the drive (first 20 blocks on the tape are used as padding followed by an ISO image written in 2kB block sizes), have no more details on that anyway

marino