I/O-Error reading my tapes

[Randy Jarrett]

In <950 at mwtech.UUCP> martin at mwtech.UUCP (Martin Weitzel) writes:

>Some days ago I upgraded from ISC 386/ix 2.02 to 2.2. Since I wanted to
>re-partition my disk I made a full installation. Now I have some
>problems (or rather inconveniences) reading the tape cartridges with
>my backups. My tape drive is an ARCHIVE ST-600 with a SC-499R controller.

>The problem is, that "cpio -i" as well as "dd" end with an I/O-Error
>on each and every tape, making it impossible to get to some of the
>files which are the last ones on the tape. (It's possible to play some
>tricks with pipelines thru "dd" and conv=sync,noerror to fully read in
>the tapes, so I had nothing really lost.)

>I'm sure, that the behavior was correct with 2.02, since I did a
>"cpio -t" on all the tapes after making the backup, just to be sure
>that everything was there.

>What further bothers me is the fact that even "cpio -o" ends with I/O-
>errors now, so I assume that not all files get out to the tape. (Of
>course I could also circumvent this by backing up a rather large file
>which I don't really need as the last one.)

>But this are all work-arounds, which make tape handling rather inconvenient,
>especially with the current bug in Archives tape drivers, that slows the
>things down after two or three operations that end with I/O-Errors,
>making it necessary to re-boot very often.

>Does anybody outhere now what's going on?


>-- 
>Martin Weitzel, email: martin at mwtech.UUCP, voice: 49-(0)6151-6 56 83

Are you getting the errors when you make the tapes or when you
read them back in to verify them.  If it is on the read it might
be the same problem I have seen before that is caused if you don't
use the 'B' option with the cpio when reading in.

On the problem with the drivers, I havn't seen or heard of that one
before. The main problem that seems to be happening when you get an 
error or abort the read or write of a tape is that you end up with a
hung process that can't be killed and you can't kill and also the tape
is unusable until you reboot the system.



-- 
Randy Jarrett  WA4MEI 
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