Target to a specific tape with tapecopy.exe

[HighKing]

Hi,

I wish to copy a (virtual) tape to a specific other one with tapecopy.exe, but can't get it to work right.
I have not found an option to target at a tape in a certain group, but dit find the -dSerialNum option to target to a tape with a certain serial number. So, I formatted the tape with serial number 1200000 (which resides in GROUP1), and did the following on the command line:

tapecopy -s GROUP0 -d GROUP1 -t "ddt-test" -dSerialNum 1200000 -o

No I get this error:
Blank tape not found in target group name[GROUP1]
FAILED TO ENUMERATE TAPES.
Tape Copy Failed

Why does it want a blank tape so badly?? I thought the -o option was for "overwrite"?
When this is going into production, I don't want to go blanking each target tape every day...

Does anyone have a good solution for this?

 

[Cyklops]

I guess you will end up erasing tapes anyway, but this is how it works: when you want to specify a target tape name using the -d and -t flags you MUST specify the random id and seq.# using the -idd and -zd switches.
As this is difficult to automate (using scripts) it is easier to automate a tape erase.
In fact tapecopy works best on blank media (ie. erased tapes).


regards

 

[HighKing]

Ok, so formatting them before is the way to go.. but how do I do that from a script?
I can't find a command-line tool capable of formatting tapes?

 

[davidmichel]

ca_devmgr

 

[HighKing]

Thanks

I made a batch file, with this:

@echo off
ca_devmgr -cherase 3 4 1 %1
tapecopy -s GROUP0 -d GROUP1 -t %2 -b

And this seems to work quite well.