Gene Heskett wrote:

On Wed March 12 2003 09:16, Eric Sproul wrote:

On Tue, 2003-03-11 at 14:39, Gene Heskett wrote:

Two other points come up here, Eric.

1. When a tape is inserted in most modern drives, the "tape
recognition cycle" will discover that this tape has been
compressed previously, and will turn the compression back on
regardless of your wishes.

Sounds good, so if I insert a tape that I *suspect* was written
compressed, but I check tapeinfo and it says the drive is still in
uncompressed mode, then I know that tape is OK, right?

You have to read something on it first to be really sure that the
drive did a "recognition cycle". Something like:
  dd ibs=256K if=/dev/your/tapedev of=/dev/null count=1

(blocksize equal to or larger than the first block on tape is fine)


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