* Ben Elliston <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (Sat, Feb 24, 2001 at 12:55:36AM +1100)
> Apologies for the semi-off-topic posting, but this no doubt reaches
> many people with experience in tape drives. My Dell PowerVault 100T
> (an Archive Pyton) has developed a strange problem where it reports
> excessive soft errors for perfectly good, brand new DDS4 tapes (having
> now tried five in a row from a fresh box).
> retrying and b) failure via I/O errors once it all gets a bit too
> much. It's also concerning that the LED is indicating this. The
> drive has been replaced once with no improvement.
The below is probably not what you wanna hear, but
Dat tapedrives are aparently notorious for getting real bad real soon if
they cannot write in streaming mode . That is, if you are sending data to
the tape at a lower speed than the tapedrive can handle, so that it writes
a bit waits a bit writes a bit waits a bit &c &c ...
If this has gone on long enough, your drive is totally screwed, and you
need a replacement (again).
A friend of mine had the same with a DDS3 drive, and ended up buying a
different drive because he couldn't get his (NT based) backup program to
stream data to the tape.
This was in the manual of his drive, check the paper docs for tour drive
and see if they say something to this effect.
Solution:
Make use of a holding disk, and have all your backups use the holding disk.
(and get a replacement drive, the new tapes thing you describe indicate
it;s a tapedrive problem).
Currently listening to: 06prisonsex
Gerhard, <@jasongeo.com> == The Acoustic Motorbiker ==
--
__O Standing above the crowd, he had a voice so strong and loud
=`\<, we'll miss him
(=)/(=) Ranting and pointing his finger, At everything but his heart
we'll miss him
