I'm trying to run tapetype on my Seagate 20G/40G (Archive Python 06408) drive, 
in a Dell PowerEdge 2450 host, using a DDS-4 tape. From running tapetype 
before, I know that it can sometimes run a long time, often longer than 24 
hours.

I kicked it off Monday morning, and it ran almost 48 hours. I guessed that 
everything was okay, because of the flashing lights on the drive. However, I 
got suspicious after 48 hours and interrupted the job. The only output was a 
message, "Could not write any data in this pass. Short write." Just this 
morning, I started it again, and got this same message in the output file after 
a couple of hours. There was no job shown by ps involving tape, but the lights 
on the drive were still flashing merrily.

Does this message indicate normal operation, and should I just be more patient 
and wait longer than 48 hours? Is the problem how I'm trying to run the job? I 
don't want to leave a terminal open, so I've tried to run it by piping the 
command to 'at now' and using 'nohup ... &'. Is there a better way?

Thanks for your thoughts.

-Kevin Zembower