dat tape

[CJENSEN_1]

how does one clean out the entire contents of a dat tape?

[MANOJ SRIVASTAVA · Accepted solution]

Bryan

You cannot clean or initalize the dat like a disk , jsut write a null file or do a

tar cvf /dev/rm/0m /dev/null


or dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/rmt/0m


Manoj Srivastava

[Sanjay_6]

Hi Bryan,

Try mt erase or tape erase.

Hope this helps.

Regds

[PIYUSH D. PATEL]

Hi,

dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/rmt/0m bs=1024k

Piyush

[PIYUSH D. PATEL]

Hi,

#mt -f /dev/rmt/0m erase

This may take a long time.

Piyush

[A. Clay Stephenson]

If you really want to do this:

This command suggested earlier won't work:

dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/rmt/0m bs=1024k

/dev/null will only supply a zero length file

but /dev/zero will supply an endless stream of
ASCII NUL's.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rmt/0m bs=1024k

If you don't have a /dev/zero device, you can creat one thusly:

mknod /dev/zero c 3 0x03

Now here's the tricky part; if you select a compression device, how does an infinite stream of 0's compress? If possible, select a non-compression device or better still simply destroy the media.

[CJENSEN_1]

Thanks.