Hello!

I saw that when it failed and ripped the tape in two on one drive back in jurrasic times.

So who's throwing away the information ?
The tape drive not sensing these holes ?
The low level driver not recognising or not asking for the info ?

The general linux/unix tape system not recognising or asking for the info ?

I have the same question.  But no answer.
I can only assure that my previous AIT-1 tapes only reported 4 times in
it's life time (it's dead now) an IO-error, while several other times,
it claimed "No space on device", not even near the end, while rewriting
the same tape a few days later could put much more data on it.

That tapedrive was connected to Linux but previously to a Solaris

machine, and both had the same view of IO-error versus 'No space on device.' I even made a graph of it with gnuplot:

I had similar experiences with several flavours of *ix*,
Linux, Ultrix, OSF1/DigitalUnix/..., HP-UX, ... only to name a few.

It seems to be a conceptual thing of the tape interface to NOT differnciate
between EOT and Read/Write errors - or is it a log lasting bug carried from
one implementation to the other ...

I think to remember that VAX/VMS was much more clever in handling

You could even boot a mini-System from there !
(Not that I would want to do this now, it took ages ... )


Bye, Peter
WOTLmade