On Apr 14,  1:02am, Greg A. Woods wrote:
} Subject: Re: Dumping to a DAT drive

} Yes, dump and all other utilities that are commonly used to read and
} write tapes should handle end-of-medium intelligently, but of course we
} must not assume that all tape hardware does the same, so there still
} must be support for media specification flags.

Also, dump has traditionally written an end of volume record (a special
record of type TS_END) and an EOF marker at the end of the tape.  This
is tough to do if you it's already banged into the hardware EOM.  I
presume this is to tell restore to ask for the next tape volume and that
that dump just didn't stop writing.

There are probably some other issues if dump is writing long logical
records to a fixed blocksize device (like a QIC tape).  Even if dump
properly detected the partial last write, restore might be confused
by the "short" record at the end of the tape.

			---  Truck