RE: Checking tapes for "goodness"

[Neil Palmer <npalmer@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Take 'Mark the Magic Electro-Magnet', turn him on, and pass him over the
tape several times while chanting 'Good Data, Nice Data'.  
This guarantees you tape will be good (and empty) !   :-)

OR, you could use the TAATOOL CHKSAVTAP command.

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        -----Original Message-----
        From:   Walden Leverich [SMTP:walden@techsoftinc.com]
        Sent:   Thursday, January 29, 1998 7:11 PM
        To:     Midrange Mailing List
        Subject:        Checking tapes for "goodness"

        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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