I found an interesting feature (bug?) in FCOPY yesterday.  As we having
 
problems creating multi-volume labeled tapes on our HP3000, myself and
another programmer were trying to figure out exactly what was going
wrong.  It seemed that when the first tape was requested, the operator
was correctly replying REPLY pin,ldev.  But, on subsequent requests
(tape 2, etc) they were also replying pin,ldev when in fact they should
 
have been replying REPLY pin,sequence #.  The sequence number was the
volume ID.  It worked okay for the second tape (it just assigned it an
ID of 7), but the third tape would not take the reply as there was
already a volume ID 7.  This has caused us all kinds of problems, but
we finally managed to figure it out.
 
The new problem (feature?, bug?) we have encountered is this:  while
testing the above, we mistakenly put a tape on-line which already
contained a label (not the label which was being requested).  The job
was requesting tape four of S70954 and we put on a tape labeled CL9524.
 
 Usually when we put on a labeled tape, the console will prompt to see
if we would like to scratch the label.  This did not.  It simply took
off.  As a result we have four tapes labeled as follows:
    S70954
    S70954 Vol ID 2
    S70954 Vol ID 3
    CL9524
 
Can someone explain this?   Why did the FCOPY take the fourth tape?  IF
 
anything I would have expected it to either reject the tape mounted, or
 
else fail completely.
 
Gary Paveza
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My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my
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