> I think your next step is to dump *lots* of data by hand to the tape (or a > couple of tapes). Forget about amanda, and just dump whole tapes worth of > data with your backup tool of choice (dump or tar, preferable). See how > that goes.
First, I just want to thank Joshua and everyone else who's helping me out here. I really appreciate this guys!!! Okay, I tried tarring one of the trouble partitions to the tape drive by hand: tar cvf /dev/nst0 /usr/src. It read in about 10K, then hung, and eventually died. The log has the following to say about this, which is what it has said before. But, I have no idea what it's talking about. When tar came back to me, it said: tar: /dev/nst0: Wrote only 0 of 10240 bytes tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now The log is as follows: Nov 28 18:16:49 snoopy kernel: scsi : aborting command due to timeout : pid 0, scsi2, channel 0, id 4, lun 0 Write (6) 00 00 28 00 00 Nov 28 18:16:49 snoopy kernel: (scsi2:0:4:0) SCSISIGI 0x4, SEQADDR 0x79, SSTAT0 0x5, SSTAT1 0x2 Nov 28 18:16:49 snoopy kernel: (scsi2:0:4:0) SG_CACHEPTR 0x3, SSTAT2 0x0, STCNT 0x0 Nov 28 18:16:51 snoopy kernel: SCSI host 2 abort (pid 0) timed out - resetting Nov 28 18:16:51 snoopy kernel: SCSI bus is being reset for host 2 channel 0. Nov 28 18:16:51 snoopy kernel: st0: Error with sense data: [valid=0] Info fld=0x0, Current st09:00: sense key Unit Attention Nov 28 18:16:51 snoopy kernel: Additional sense indicates Scsi bus reset occurred Nov 28 18:16:51 snoopy kernel: (scsi2:0:4:0) Synchronous at 40.0 Mbyte/sec, offset 62. Nov 28 18:16:51 snoopy kernel: st0: Error with sense data: [valid=0] Info fld=0x0, Current st09:00: sense key Not Ready Nov 28 18:16:51 snoopy kernel: Additional sense indicates Logical unit is in process of becoming ready Nov 28 18:16:51 snoopy kernel: st0: Error on write filemark.
