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8.8.7: Formatting of cartridges using MTIOCFTFORMAT

Most of the formatting stuff has been moved from the kernel level device driver to a user level program ftformat(1). Please refer to the documentation of that program for further information how to actually format floppy tape cartridges. See Ftformat (info file ftape-tools).

The following gives only an outline of the ioctl interface to the kernel level device driver. The argument to the MTIOCFTFORMAT ioctl has to be of type struct mtftformat. The definitions of that structure and of the ioctl are included in a subsection for your reference.

Note that the MTIOCFTFORMAT ioctl has to be accompanied by several MTIOCFTCMD ioctl calls. See MTIOCFTCMD. It has to be understood that the MTIOCFTFORMAT does not switch the tape drive to format mode, neither does it erase the old format by means of the `physical forward' or `physical reverse' QIC-117 floppy tape commands.

There is subsection for each of the operations that can be performed with the MTIOCFTFORMAT ioctl (i.e. FTFMT_SET_PARMS, FTFMT_GET_PARMS, FTFMT_FORMAT_TRACK, FTFMT_STATUS, FTFMT_VERIFY) and an additional subsection that is a quotation from [/usr/src/ftape-4.05/]include/linux/mtio.h and contains the ioctl definitions.

FTFORMAT compatibility Differences between ftape-3.04d and ftape-4.05.
struct mtftformat MTIOCFTFORMAT ioctl definition.
FTFMT_SET_PARMS Set software parameters.
FTFMT_GET_PARMS Get software parameters.
FTFMT_FORMAT_TRACK Start formatting a tape track.
FTFMT_STATUS Monitor formatting a tape track.
FTFMT_VERIFY Verify a floppy tape segment.


(1) You can download it as part of the ftape-tools package from the
Ftape home page
or from ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/kernel/tapes/


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