On 01-03-98, RICK PALI said to ALL:
RP>I've got an Exabyte 8mm drive and wonder about tapes. Is there any way to
RP>get the software to go through a tape and see if it's good? Does a secure
RP>erase do this?
RP>I ask because I've got at least one tape that's aborted in the middle of a
RP>backup with a write-failure. That's a waste of my time so I'd like to make
RP>sure in advanace that everything's fine with the tapes...
That's exactly the procedure that I've used to "format" the tapes (no, it's
really not a format).  However, it takes ~3 hours per tape with any
possibility of aborting other than to reset the SCSI bus (or power cycle the
drive).  Rebooting is my usual "solution".
You may want to clean the drive heads, too...
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