Greetings,
How can I figure out how large my blocks are on my st0 backup tapes?

~ matt

Matt wrote:
If you know what the blocks on tape should look like, you could do

od -c /dev/st0 | less and see. Sometimes this will work.

Other times, you have to know what size you wrote them with.

If you use mt -f /dev/st0 setblk blocksize

that is what you should get.

With most tape drives, if you read a tape with a blocksize less than the
size it was written with, the rest of the block will be skipped. So if
you write a tape with integers in it, you should be able to tell after
about two blocks, what size was used to write it.

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In article <c1o64402ll@enews2.newsguy.com>, Matt <no@spam.com> wrote:
:Greetings,
:How can I figure out how large my blocks are on my st0 backup tapes?

$ mt setblk 0
$ dd if=/dev/st0 bs=1024k count=1 | wc -c

--
Bob Nichols AT interaccess.com I am "rnichols"