Hi!
You have a funny way of intermixing long and short lines,
that is *horrible* to read, allow me to fix it ... THERE,
much better! I also threw in a few blank lines.
Trying to kill the keyboard, [EMAIL PROTECTED] produced:
> Hi there,
> I bought a DITTO 2GB drive some time ago, and now that it can
> be used by ftape y bought a set of DITTO 3.7GB cartridges to
> make systematic backups of my Linux System.
Well, the Ditto 2GB uses proprietary Ditto 2GB tapes
(actually 1GB uncompressed) *only*.
> The tapes are a bit larger than the 2GB tapes I had before,
> but they fit well into the unit. Howerever, the tapes get
> de-spooled very easily. Except when you introduce them the first
> time (already rewinded), whatever you do (read them, write to
> them, retension them, ...) with whatever tool (either tar
> or KDAT in linux, or the Ditto software in Windows98) will
> inevitably de-spool the tapes. I have tried all five 3.7GB
> tapes I bought. Always the same result. When I then put my
> old 2GB tapes, everything works well.
Despooling is a drive problem, like the write protect hole
in floppy disks there is nothing the software could do,
neither wrong nor right. Since your 2GB tapes work A-OK in
that respect, I tend to say that you just have had bad luck
using tapes the drive has not been build for.
> I noticed the little windows at the bottom face of the tapes
> (the metallic one) is a bit smaller than for the 2GB tapes. Can
> this be the reason?
Most probably is. EOT and BOT is detected by little holes
in the tape. If they never get seen (thought that hole via a
mirror (the metallic thing inside)) the tape drive will never
know the tape is being despooled. You might try to build some
hardware to work around it, but that will kill any guarantee,
obviously (and I have no idea whether that will ever work).
Also the Ditto 2GB cannot format tapes. It's intentionally
crippled, IMHO.
-Wolfgang
PS: sig too long error [d]ie or [c]rash?
