I wasn't sure if this posted or not.  I am experiencing difficulty with
my email account.  Sorry if you get this twice.
 
 
I found an interesting feature (bug?) in FCOPY yesterday.  As we have
been having problems creating multi-volume labeled tapes on the HP,
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 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 as the ID 7 was already
being used.  This has caused us all kinds of problems, but we finally
figured out the problem.
 
The new problem we have encountered is this:  while testing the above,
we mistakenly put tape on-line that ALREADY had a label (not the label
which was being asked for).  It was asking for the fourth tape of
S70954 and we put on a tape labeled CL9524.  Usually when we put on a
labeled tape, it will ask us if we wish 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
employer.
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