Hi, Maciej mentioned "winding a tape past a medium error and read...".
I have several times successfully skipped past media errors on DDS-1 drives by doing a FSF (Forward Skip File ... tells drive to skip to the next EOF). (Although, IIRC, once I encountered a read error, I couldn't do that ... I recall having to 'sneak up' on the error by positioning the drive to the prior EOF and then skipping forward. But since I haven't done it for more than 10 year, maybe my memories are classic, er, rusty.) My recollection is that DDS-1 (and perhaps -2?) had 'set marks' that few people knew about, and even fewer ever used. The explanation I recall is that the drive could do a "forward to next setmark" *much* faster than "forward to next EOF". (BTW, when reading, a setmark was reported like an EOF (although if you requested extra status you could tell them apart).) I never tried using the skip-to-next-setmark to get past errors, partially because the tapes I was recovering years ago didn't have setmarks. (Set marks are one reason I prefer my tape archiving format, since I record them, as well as retry information :) Al: thanks for expanding my answer about cutting out a portion of the tape ... I'd forgotten about helical recording. (Note that on ordinary multi-track tapes, cutting a section does indeed lose data from n different places on the tape ... any tape that requires multiple passes over the tape to get from BOT to the full capacity of the tape.) Stan
