Formatting a tape?

[Andrew Hamilton-Wright]

On Thu, 19 Mar 2009, Jaime wrote:

> I have a DLT tape drive in a FreeBSD system.  With one of the tapes, I
> can get "tar -cvpf /dev/sa0 -C / ." to work.  With all the other
> tapes, I can't.
>
> Is there some kind of formatting process that I need to do?  I tried
> "mt fsf 1" from this page:

I assume that this is a fresh tape?  Do other tapes from the same batch work?

What happens if you use dd to try and write to the tape?

The command
 	dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sa0 count=8
should print out:
 	8+0 records in
 	8+0 records out

If you are getting something else, I might suspect a physical media problem.
I have certainly gotten the odd dud tape before.

A.