I'm trying to run tapetype on my Seagate 20G/40G (Archive Python 06408) drive,
in a Dell PowerEdge 2450 host, using a DDS-4 tape. From running tapetype
before, I know that it can sometimes run a long time, often longer than 24
hours.
I kicked it off Monday morning, and it ran almost 48 hours. I guessed that
everything was okay, because of the flashing lights on the drive. However, I
got suspicious after 48 hours and interrupted the job. The only output was a
message, "Could not write any data in this pass. Short write." Just this
morning, I started it again, and got this same message in the output file after
a couple of hours. There was no job shown by ps involving tape, but the lights
on the drive were still flashing merrily.
Does this message indicate normal operation, and should I just be more patient
and wait longer than 48 hours? Is the problem how I'm trying to run the job? I
don't want to leave a terminal open, so I've tried to run it by piping the
command to 'at now' and using 'nohup ... &'. Is there a better way?
Thanks for your thoughts.
-Kevin Zembower
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