Mediainit usage

[Carter Jay]

Hello,

Can someone help me to use mediainit on a DLT tape?
Is this useful, as we just need to use a mt rew, then launch fbackup??

Thanks for your advised help

Regards

Jerome

[harry d brown jr · Accepted solution]

Why in the world would you use mediainit for a tape if you plan on using it again for backups??


live free or die
harry

[Vincent Farrugia]

Hello,

You don't need to mediainit the tape... anyway that would NOT work on tape devices. If you want to perform a backup and overwrite the contents, just start the backup in the usual way. Tape devices are rewound automatically if you are using the 0m device file, and it will be rewound anyway if you remove the cartidge from the drive. So just start the backup normally and it will be automatically overwritten.

HTH,
Vince

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi
Perhaps you are confused by "mediainit" in some Backup programs (as OmniBack). With this you need to init a tape befor using it. But not with fbackup,tar,cpio,dd etc..

[Darrell Allen]

Hi Jerome,

Normally mediainit does not need to be run on tapes. However, I have found one situation where it helped.

I had some DDS tapes that had been "borrowed" by an NT admin. After the tapes were used to make a backup on NT, they were put back in my scratch pool. I consequently tried to use them to create a tarfile on tape and almost immediately was prompted by tar for another tape to continue the backup. I tried another of my scratch tapes with the same result.

I broke out of the tar command, read some man pages, did some forums searching, then used "mediainit -v /dev/rmt/1m" on the tape. I was then able to use the tape.

I've never had another reason to use mediainit on a tape. And since that was new to me, I only use these tapes for scratch purposes where it doesn't matter (much) if I can't re-read them (although I've not had a problem re-reading them). I guess I am being overly cautious but I don't want to take chances with backups of production servers.

Darrell

[Ravi_8]

Hi.
'mediainit' is used for formatting the harddisk in HP systems. you no need to format the tapes, while taking the backup.