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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.cis.okstate.edu!nntp.ksu.edu!news.physics.uiowa.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!msunews!gvsu!river.it.gvsu.edu!behrensm From: behrensm@river.it.gvsu.edu (Matt Behrens) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Can ft format, or can't it? Date: 15 Nov 1996 23:08:23 GMT Organization: Grand Valley State University Lines: 34 Message-ID: <56it57$fjh@news.gvsu.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: river.it.gvsu.edu X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL0] Hi all, I'm about to install a floppy tape drive (please, no advice to go SCSI, I'm on an incredibly tight budget here) onto our FreeBSD server here. While I'm waiting for 7 PM to roll around so that I can shut it down, I decided to do a little web poking-around to see if there are any updates or whatever that might prove useful; since the man page to ft from my FreeBSD-2.1.5 says we can't format the tapes. I came across a piece of FreeBSD documentation at http://bonkers.neosoft.com/manuals/options.html that said: "The `ft' driver is available for QIC-80 "floppy tape" support. The drivers support formatting both tapes and disks. This driver is substantially improved from that shipped in previous releases of FreeBSD." As far as I can tell, this little snippet refers to FreeBSD 1.1.5. Am I missing something? If I can (re)format these tapes without having to reboot to DOS all the time, I'd save many many headaches from the people who use this server to do their catalog searching and hate having it unavailable for more than five minutes. I looked into FreeBSD-current/src/sbin for ft sources, but could find nothing of the sort. I'm a relatively new FreeBSD user here and I'd appreciate any info you could give me; especially where I can turn for info that is not the Handbook or the FAQ or whatever: they all tell me I can't do it. Thanks! -- Matt "Zigg" Behrens | "The only thing I hate more than behrensm@river.it.gvsu.edu | tailgaters are people who go really slow zigg@iserv.net | in front of me." http://www2.gvsu.edu/~behrensm | - A. Whitney Brown