Re: Checking tapes for "goodness"

Walden,
        Will CPYTOTAP do the job?
        That is what has been recommended to me in the past.
        It runs fairly quickly, and you can just delete the spool file when 
done.
        Would this do the sort of interrogation of the tape that your seeking?

Dave





----------
From: Walden Leverich <walden@techsoftinc.com>
To: Midrange Mailing List <midrange-l@midrange.com>
Subject: Checking tapes for "goodness"
Date: Thursday, January 29, 1998 7:11 PM

All,

I recently received a set of tapes from a vendor and before I install the
software on these tapes I would like to tape a pass over the tapes and
check
for any media errors. CHKTAP is useless as it does not actually look at
_all_ the tape media, I believe the same can be said of DSPTAP, as it only
looks at the directory information.

Someone has just mentioned DUPTAP as a possibility sine this would have to
read the entire media in order to duplicate it, but errors in the
bytestream
would not be detected (or would they?) Bytestream errors are errors where
the tape is still valid, but the data meaningless, for example when the
tape
should contain x'01234567890ABCDEF' and it does contain x'FEDCBA0987654321'
the restore process would kick this out as invalid (I hope) but DUPTAP
would
be more than willing to copy this bad string to another tape.

Anyway, how do others check the validity of media before starting
installation processes? Or do you just cross your fingers and hope?

Thanks,
-Walden

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