[geeks] backups

[Joshua D Boyd]

Well, I'm trying to get a tape drive working so that I can finally do proper
backups.  I've run into trouble.  I was hoping that someone could help.

Anyway, I'm now trying to get tapedrive number 2 working.  The first one, 
purchased from ebay was DOA I determined after much time (the scsi card and
scsi cable also weren't yet proven to be working, plus I knew nothing about 
operating tape drives).  This new drive is an HP SureStore Tape 5000.  So, it
appeared to be working for a bit.  I did 'mt erase', and it worked, 'mt rewind'
and it worked, 'mt status' and it worked.  Then I did mt offline.  When I put
the tape back in, every mt command returns "mt: /dev/tape: Input/output error".
I also found a new entry in /var/log/messages:
Dec  1 23:44:38 medea kernel: Additional sense indicates Not ready to ready chan
ge,medium may have changed
Dec  1 23:45:00 medea kernel: st0: Error with sense data: Current st09:00: sense
 key Unit Attention
Dec  1 23:45:00 medea kernel: Additional sense indicates Not ready to ready chan
ge,medium may have changed


So, this drive is hooked up to a scsi card and cable thought to be good (they 
worked with my SCSI cdrom).  I thought perhaps the new tape drive is bad, but
decided to come back to it later (I'm trying to do a whole slew of hardware 
upgrades in one day).  After fiddling with the video card for awhile (NVidea 
TNT2, now working what appears to be perfectly), and several reboots (new 
kernel.  One reboot to test, then change lilo to make the new one default, and
reboot to make sure the lilo changes were good), I came back to the tape drive
again.  It appeared to be working again from the perspective of simple mt 
commands.  Then I tried the mt offline command again, and when I put in the new
tape, I got the io error again.  And the same /var/log/message errors.

Well, I've worked on some other things, now I've come back (w/o rebooting in
between), and now when I try mt commands, I get the following errors in 
/var/log/messages:

Dec  2 01:04:24 medea kernel: st0: Error 26030000 (sugg. bt 0x20, driver bt 0x6, host bt 0x3).
Dec  2 01:05:05 medea kernel: st0: Error 26030000 (sugg. bt 0x20, driver bt 0x6, host bt 0x3).

However, if I do: dd if=src.tar of=/dev/st0
I get no errors.  If I do: dd of=test.tar if=/dev/st0, the resulting file is
exactly the same size, but tar refuses to recognize it.

Let me try rebooting again and see if anything is clearer when I do.




I would test this tape drive on a sparc machine, but I just can't get it to fit
into the spare external scsi bay I have, and my sparcs don't have 5.25in 
external drive bays.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd