What is my tape drive doing?

[GusBrown]

Hi,

I have a Sony SDX-D700C external SCSI AIT drive that I'm using to read data from SDX3-100C tapes, with a simple c++ application (vc++, w2k). The problem is this: if I run my application as soon as windows has loaded it will allow me to create a handle to the tape drive (using CreateFile(...)) and load the tape (using PrepareTape(...)) but when I then use ReadFile(...) to read data from the tape it fails with error 87 (the parameter is incorrect). However, if I close the application, wait for around a minute and run it again it works perfectly. During that 1 minute wait the tape drive clicks and whirs and does something - the question is what?
At the moment I've told my client that he just has to wait for 1 minute between loading Windows and running my app but that's hardly the ideal solution. Is there a way I can force whatever the drive is doing in that 1 minute wait?

It's possible that I've completely missunderstood the problem so if you have any other ideas I'm willing to listen!

Thanks,

Gus

 

[torturedmind]

tape drives work much diffrently than HD, CDROMS and Floppies in such a way that data are stored/read SEQUENTIALLY. this is likely the reason why you have to wait some time for your app to gain access to the data stored in the tape.

kilroy