Checking tapes for "goodness"

["Walden Leverich" <walden@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

All,

 

I recently received a set of tapes from a vendor and before I install the software on these tapes I would like to tape a pass over the tapes and check for any media errors. CHKTAP is useless as it does not actually look at _all_ the tape media, I believe the same can be said of DSPTAP, as it only looks at the directory information.

 

Someone has just mentioned DUPTAP as a possibility sine this would have to read the entire media in order to duplicate it, but errors in the bytestream would not be detected (or would they?) Bytestream errors are errors where the tape is still valid, but the data meaningless, for example when the tape should contain x'01234567890ABCDEF' and it does contain x'FEDCBA0987654321' the restore process would kick this out as invalid (I hope) but DUPTAP would be more than willing to copy this bad string to another tape.

 

Anyway, how do others check the validity of media before starting installation processes? Or do you just cross your fingers and hope?

 

Thanks,

-Walden