UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Does the device drive /dev/tape exist on your machine? Often, it is a symbolic link to specific device driver.

Please post the output of the command:

ls -l /dev/tape

Neo

No it does not exist.

# ls -l /dev/tape
/dev/tape not found

How/what do I need to do to rectify this?

I think that you're taking PxT too literally here. I think that you were supposed to replace /dev/tape with the name of your tape drive. The actual naming convention varies from system to system. In your case, /dev/nrmt0h seems to be the anwser. I am guessing that the n means "no-rewind" and the h means high density.

Not all tape drivers can handle all possible options of the mt command. The driver does not know how to erase your dds-1 tape. Drivers sometimes set the wrong (or at least not the best) error code.

IIRC, DDS-1 tapes are very easy to destroy since they can't read past the end of data.

dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/nrmt0h

should do it.

Cheers Perderabo,

Using dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/nrmt0h obs=516

Works without error and gives the result

0+0 records in
0+0 records out

Sadly however the contents of the tape can still be read.

What command do you use to read the tape? Since you say the tape can be read, please post the command you used (in your post above) to read it, thanks.

Neo,

We were ....

@ 06:47
MessageVdump to write the tape
Vrestore to read it

later on ...

@ 07:07
MessageCam

I had a trawl of the internet.
Looks like the scu (SCSI Utility program) is the way to go

scu -f /dev/nrmt0h mt erase

I am testng, looks like it is working, take a long time though.

Jim

I hate and love how there are sooo many ways to skin these cats.

Not withstanding that we've found one solution, what other way could we have solved this??