SCSI tape question

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2014-12-15 14:23, Mouse wrote:
>> Two tape marks is just a convention used by some software to indicate
>> the logical EOT.  It has no special meaning for the hardware.
>
> Perhaps on some drives (such as 9-tracks).  But I did run into one
> drive, one of the relatively modern cartridge drives with tapes about
> the size of a TK50, which had a relatively elaborate encoding scheme in
> which EOT was different from two consecutive tapemarks, but it mapped
> between the two in each direction and the drive refused to even try to
> read past EOT.  In order to recover data that had been written over,
> the recommended procedure was to write enough to overwrite the EOT mark
> and then power down the drive while it was writing more.  (Recommended
> by users, not the maker IIRC.)

Oh. Yuck... So ANSI tape format would be impossible on such a tape. That 
is a very broken hardware.

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol