Hi
I need to make some restore tapes for our old AIX systems
I have purchased some DDS2 tapes and cleaning tapes
The tape drive is rmt0
what commands can I enter to run the cleaning tape through the drive
and are the any commands I can enter to test these drives
prior to using mksysb
madmacher
I'm not an AIX expert so I can only answer in generic Unix terms.
The tape drive type you have can be DDS, DDS2 or DDS3. They vary in tape capacity.
If you put a tape in the drive and it immediately ejects it then it's the wrong version.
The tapes are all recognised by the little holes in them so the drive either recognises the tape type or doesn't.
A cleaning tape will be recognised immediately as such, and will invoke firmware on the DDS drive itself and perform a cleaning cycle and eject the tape automatically at the end. Therefore, to answer your first question, there are no commands for the cleaning function. It just does it.
If you enter an ordinary data tape then there are ways to test it directly.
[generic Unix commands]
cd <any directory>
tar cvf /dev/rmt0 .
note: on AIX rmt0 may be in a sub-directory of /dev
You could then read the tape back with:
tar tvf /dev/rmt0
A DDS tape drive knows through internal checksums, etc if it's reading corrupt data so this tape listing will fail if the drive is faulty.
Hope that helps.
The IBM Tape Help Package (an oldie but a goodie and it covers DDS2, 3 and 4)
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/server/firmware/tapewhdr.html