Erasing a tape previously used by another product

[Mike Sutherland]

I am trying to use some tapes that were originally formatted by Legato NetWorker on a DLT8000 unit using a Dantz 6.5.283 system.

 

I have a SUN DLT4700 jukebox unit with a DLT 4000 drive in it. I load a DLTIV tape, that was formatted and used on another system, into the slots of the jukebox. Then using Dantz I try to load the tape into the drive. Dantz loads the tape tries to read it then ejects the tape

without offering the option of erasing the tape. If I load the tape manually from the jukebox I get the same response from Dantz, the tape loads then ejects.

 

I never get to the option of erasing the tape.

 

Is there some way of overriding the fact that Dantz tries to read the tape first before it will mount the tape? I know the format is incorrect because it was not formatted on the Dantz system. The original formatting is the only difference between the tapes that don't work and the tapes that do.

 

The tapes that I am trying to salvage are not that old and I hate to waste good tapes.

 

Any help that can be offered will be welcome.

[natew]

Hi

 

Unfortunately DLT4 tapes can cause this kind of trouble. In some cases the only way to resolve the issue is to bulk erase.

 

Have you tried erasing them with the Windows backup utility first?

 

Thanks

Nate

[jda11560]

Found a little command-line program on Sourceforge; "winmt.exe", only 44Kb in size. I have already used it, pretty simple to use if I could.

The only thing might stump you a bit is 'devicename'., this should be "tape0", "tape1" etc, (without the exclamation/commas though.

 

Windows mt, a command line utility, with rich set of commands to operate tape devices. Supported commands:weof wset eof fsf bsf fsr bsr fss bss rew eject retension eod status erase srterase(short erase) setblk lock unlock load compression read and write.

Download from:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/winmt