Displaying Tape Drive Status

You can use the status option with the mt command to get status information about tape drives. The mt command reports information about any tape drives that are described in the /kernel/drv/st.conf file.

How to Display Tape Drive Status

1. Load a tape into the drive you want information about.
2. Display the tape drive status.

   # mt -f /dev/rmt/n status

3. Repeat steps 1–2, substituting tape drive numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, and so on to display information about all available tape drives.

The following example shows the status for a QIC-150 tape drive (/dev/rmt/0):

$ mt -f /dev/rmt/0 status
Archive QIC-150 tape drive:
   sense key(0x0)= No Additional Sense   residual= 0   retries= 0
   file no= 0   block no= 0

The following example shows the status for an Exabyte tape drive (/dev/rmt/1):

$ mt -f /dev/rmt/1 status
Exabyte EXB-8200 8mm tape drive:
sense key(0x0)= NO Additional Sense residual= 0  retries= 0
file no= 0   block no= 0

The following example shows a quick way to poll a system and locate all of its tape drives:

$ for drive in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
> do
> mt -f /dev/rmt/$drive status
> done
Archive QIC-150 tape drive:
   sense key(0x0)= No Additional Sense   residual= 0   retries= 0
   file no= 0   block no= 0
/dev/rmt/1: No such file or directory
/dev/rmt/2: No such file or directory
/dev/rmt/3: No such file or directory
/dev/rmt/4: No such file or directory
/dev/rmt/5: No such file or directory
/dev/rmt/6: No such file or directory
/dev/rmt/7: No such file or directory
$