I/O-Error reading my tapes

[Martin Weitzel]

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