maa@ssc-vax.UUCP (Mark A Allyn) (10/15/89)
I have an Iris 3130 workstation that has a 1/4 inch cartridge tape drive as /dev/rmt1. I have been doing my backups using tar which I assume uses this device with a default blocking factor of 400. I have a few questions about this: 1. We use 600 foot tape cartridges which have an alleged capacity of 60 mb. Can anyone varify this? 2. I have a problem right now where I have tried to tar a directory tree that I know is about 50 mb by using the du command on this directory tree. The tar utility will come back with a message 'tape error or end of tape - insert new tape to continue'. My question is if the 600 foot tape is supposed to be able to hold 60 mb, then why is this doing this? I have tried several tapes with the same results. I have also rebooted the system with the same results. 3. I have been told that if tar does require another tape to complete its job, that the system may crash and that the tape drive goes into a funny state. Is this true, and why, and what could I do to alleviate this problem. Is this a problem with the drive itself, the software device driver not 'cleaning up' after the end of tape error, or what? Thanks in advance! Mark Allyn Boeing Aerospace uw-beaver!ssc-vax!ssc-bee!maa