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8.1.3.7: `/dev/rawft*', `/dev/nrawft*'

When using the driver with these device-special files it is not possible to use file marks. Data is read from and written to tape as is, no compression. Note that the volume table segment that is used to emulate file marks when using the driver with the other devices is treated as an ordinary data segment. Thus reading the first 29 kilobytes from the tape will give you the data of the volume table segment.

The driver does not detect tapes used by the original ftape-2.x.

These devices could for example be used when writing backup software that is really QIC-113 compatible (zftape uses the volume-table in a way which provides only minimal QIC-113 compatibility, http://www.qic.org). There are two additional ioctls which provide read (see MTIOCRDFTSEG and MTIOCWRFTSEG) and write access to arbitrary floppy tape segments, including the header segments.

The file ftape-header-segment.h of the ftape-3.04d distribution provides some definitions which might be useful for writing a QIC-113 compatible backup program.


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