[Info-vax] DLT Tape degaussing services

[JF Mezei]

Richard B. Gilbert wrote:

> Is there some reason you can't simply INIT the tapes and reuse them?

when you physically load the tape, the tape drives discovers the type of
tape being loaded and will preserve that type and/or won't let you init
it as a different type of tape.

For intance, if you mount a TK70 onto a DLT drive, it will be mounted
write-locked. Can't init it.  But zap all information from the tape, and
the drive will have a "?" as tape type and probanly initialises it as
its own native format (equivalent of a low level format of a disk) and
then let you init it.