It's looking like that tape is bad. Does this happen on all your tapes
or just this one? If it's all the tapes, I'd start worrying about the
drive or controller.
Here's another sequence to try:
$ mt -f /dev/nst0 rewind
$ mt -f /dev/nst0 fsf 1
$ dd if=/dev/nst0 bs=32k count=1 > /tmp/block.0
$ ls -l /tmp/block.0
$ head -4 < /tmp/block.0
$ mt -f /dev/nst0 rewind
$ mt -f /dev/nst0 fsf 1
$ dd if=/dev/nst0 bs=32k of=/dev/null
The first dd will bring in the label block from the file. In theory,
it should be 32 KBytes and start with some text.
The second dd will tell us how long the file is and if it is all 32
KByte blocks.
If this problem is happening on all your tapes, I'd mount a scratch tape,
create a file of a few MBytes that is a multiple of 32 KBytes then do
several dd's with bs=32k to the tape without repositioning in between,
i.e. so the tape ends up with several files on it. Then rewind the tape
and read the files back in to see if you get back what you wrote.
John R. Jackson, Technical Software Specialist, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
