Re: Busted Tape Drive
2008-08-07 14:22:07
Steven Backus wrote at 10:20 -0600 on Aug 7, 2008:
> I've determined my drive can label tapes but can't read old
> tapes. I get the Input/Output error whenever trying to read a
> previously labeled tape or dd out anything. However, if I re-label
> the tape it works again. Does this indicate a failing drive? Any
> other ideas?
I've seen problematic behavior when the tape unit is set to have a
particular block size (that may not match at read time what was used
to write a tape).
We set the block size for the tape unit to have variable length blocks
when doing amanda writes & reads.
In FreeBSD, that's 'mt blocksize 0' and for linux, 'mt setblk 0'.
(also we set hardware compression off)
I don't know if that will help in your case or not.
I assume you've done the simple test:
dd if=/dev/random bs=32k of=/tmp/foo count=1
mt -f /dev/<yourtape> rew
dd if=/tmp/foo bs=32k of=/dev/<yourtape> count=1
mt -f /dev/<yourtape> rew
dd of=/tmp/foo2 bs=32k if=/dev/<yourtape> count=1
diff /tmp/foo /tmp/foo2
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