>}QIC tape of any type? BZZT! You lose. Unfortunately, not only does writing
>     BZZT!  You obviously don't have much experience with Tandberg QIC
>drives.  I routinely store multiple "files" on tapes using them.

It is true that I don't have much experience with Tandberg drives, but
I misexplained what I was trying to say, which may yet make Tandberg drives
not the solution.  I should have said that the end-of-media flag is hard
as far as the microcode is concerned, not EOF (I, too, have stored multiple
files on QIC-150 tapes).  I don't *know* if Tandberg drives regard the EOM
as permanent (and since the erasure scheme would likely be different with
the servo track, perhaps they don't need to), but that's the real key to
this problem, not the EOF mark.