SCO Xenix / Archive VP150

[Frank I. Reiter]

We recently upgraded from an Archive FT60 tape drive to a VP150 150 meg tape
drive.  Because we often backup more than 60 megs at a time we were using

backup ufsd0 /dev/erct0 600 20000

to backup onto multiple 60 meg tapes.  I thought that for the meantime I
would just double the density to 40000 but when I tried it backup said it
was ready to backup 300 megs onto 2 tapes (150 megs each, I was trying to
specify 120 megs each as I am not using the longer tapes required to write
150 megs) and, as expected, the backup aborted with a write error after about
130 megs.

QUESTION 1: What s and d parameters will give me 125 megs on a tape?

backup didn't seem to want to cooperate with me so I tuned to tar and used 
"k 125000" to tell it where to stop.  It prompted for the new tape right on
schedule but aborted with "Unable to reopen /dev/erct0" when I typed a CR.
Digging farther I found that current versions of backup also recognize a k
parameter so I tried backup again with k 125000.

This time backup got the size correct, but also did this:

Please insert new volume, then press <RETURN>:
backup: cannot create /dev/erct0

Please check the drive, then press <RETURN>:

Pressing return a second time worked fine.  The same thing occured on tape 3.

QUESTION 2: Is this normal?  Is this related to "k" indicating a block device?
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Frank I. Reiter              UUCP:  {uunet,ubc-cs}!van-bc!rsoft!frank
Reiter Software Inc.                frank at rsoft.bc.ca,  a2 at mindlink.UUCP
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