At 04:35 PM 2/5/98 -0500, Therm-O-Link wrote:
>:FILE T;DEV=TAPE;REC=-276,10,F,ASCII
>:FCOPY FROM=W2TAPE.PUB.TPRL;TO=*T

I realize it's a nit I'm picking here, but I *always* use "VERIFY" on any
FCOPY to tape that I might want to be able to read again later.  However, I
doubt that would have changed the outcome you received.

>So, what is the problem here?  Any ideas?  Personally, I
>think it's because the DDS-2 tape drive doesn't like anything
>but 120M tapes (well, it might make an exception for a 90M
>tape).  What do you think?

Presuming that your vendor's drive (which needs to read the tape, of
course) is a DDS-1 drive, you will need to send them a 90m or shorter tape
without hardware data compression enabled, as you indicated.  If everything
works as they are designed, that should be sufficient to provide
compatibility.

Note: Tapes must be labeled "DDS2", "DDS3" (for DDS-3 or higher drives) or
"DDS||||" (four vertical bars indicating MRS, "Media Recognition System")
in order to be written to by DDS-2 or later drives.  This is because the
early DDS-1 (mainly old 60m and some old 90m) media (marked "DDS" without
the number or bars) didn't provide a way for the new drives to determine
their length, which they must do to determine the proper recording mode.

However, I have *heard about* (but *NOT* seen direct evidence supporting)
claims that some DDS-2 and DDS-3 drives have problems writing DDS-1 (90m or
shorter) tapes.  This sounds like such a problem, as you point out.  If it
turns out to be true, it's a significant defect because one of the design
goals for all DDS drives is to be media interchange compatible with older
drives when used with media supported on both drives.  I suspect that it
will be difficult to prove whether this is an isolated "bad tape" kind of
incident or something more fundamentally flawed.
--
Jeff Woods
[log in to unmask] at Tivoli Systems
[log in to unmask]   at home  [PGP key available here via finger]

"Life is too short to be spent as a cog in somebody else's machine."
      --  F. Alfredo Rego, 4 Dec 1997 on HP3000-L