"John R. Jackson" wrote: > >***A TAPE ERROR OCCURRED: [[writing filemark: Input/output error]]. > > First, Amanda is doing nothing more than report to you what the OS > told it. So there really was an I/O error of some type someplace. > It's unlikely Amanda could cause this (except possibly by tripping some > other hardware or software bug). >
Along those lines, here's what I see in dmesg after it finally fails: ide-tape: ht0: DSC timeout ide-tape: ht0: position_tape failed in discard_pipeline() ide-tape: ht0: DSC timeout hdc: DMA disabled hdc: ATAPI reset complete ide-tape: ht0: I/O error, pc = 10, key = 2, asc = 4 ascq =1 ide-tape: Couldn't write a filemark > >... I was able to successfully amlabel my tapes, and amcheck > >appears to be happy. ... > > What happens if you try to amlabel one of your already labelled tapes? > I get: rewinding, reading label DailySet101, tape is active rewinding tape not labeled so I guess it refused to do it. Is this what is supposed to happen? > > What happens if you run amcheck with the -w option (warning -- this > will rewrite the tape label so only do it on a tape that can stand to > be clobbered). After switching to the tape Amanda wants to see next, I get: Amanda Tape Server Host Check ------------------------- Tape DailySet100 is writable Tape DailySet100 label ok Server check took 4.565 seconds (brought to you by Amanda 2.4.2p2) Seems okay, is this what you expect? > > > You might also try creating a file that is an even multiple of 32 KBytes > (e.g. "dd if=/something of=/test-file bs=32k count=100" where /something > is smaller than 100*32KBytes), then set up a script with a dozen or so > dd's in a row (the first four lines emulate the Amanda label processing): > > mt -f /dev/whatever rewind > dd if=/dev/whatever of=/dev/null bs=32k count=1 > mt -f /dev/whatever rewind > dd if=/test-file of=/dev/whatever bs=32k count=1 > > dd if=/test-file of=/dev/whatever bs=32k > dd if=/test-file of=/dev/whatever bs=32k > dd if=/test-file of=/dev/whatever bs=32k > dd if=/test-file of=/dev/whatever bs=32k > dd if=/test-file of=/dev/whatever bs=32k > dd if=/test-file of=/dev/whatever bs=32k > dd if=/test-file of=/dev/whatever bs=32k > ... > > and see how this goes. It's not exactly like what Amanda does, but is > closer than simple mt/tar statements. Also, when put in a script like > this, it will keep the tape busy. > > Note that this will clobber the test tape. > I did this, and it seemed to work fine. No I/O errors, just nice little messages from dd confirming reads and writes of so many blocks. I had 30 or so writes in the script, and they all seemed to complete okay. > > >... the > >tape runs for a while, and then it just hangs for a hour or so, until > >something times out and fails. > > Sounds like a hardware/cable/controller problem to me. Start jiggling > things (yeah, I know, yet another highly technical term :-). If you > have enough hardware, try moving the drive to a different controller, > swap the cables, etc. > Tried this, too. Switched to the other IDE controller, still get the same behavior. I really appreciate your help trying to figure this out. Do you have any other ideas on how I can track this problem down? Steve Stanners
