Steven Backus wrote at 10:20 -0600 on Aug 7, 2008: > I've determined my drive can label tapes but can't read old > tapes. I get the Input/Output error whenever trying to read a > previously labeled tape or dd out anything. However, if I re-label > the tape it works again. Does this indicate a failing drive? Any > other ideas?
I've seen problematic behavior when the tape unit is set to have a particular block size (that may not match at read time what was used to write a tape). We set the block size for the tape unit to have variable length blocks when doing amanda writes & reads. In FreeBSD, that's 'mt blocksize 0' and for linux, 'mt setblk 0'. (also we set hardware compression off) I don't know if that will help in your case or not. I assume you've done the simple test: dd if=/dev/random bs=32k of=/tmp/foo count=1 mt -f /dev/<yourtape> rew dd if=/tmp/foo bs=32k of=/dev/<yourtape> count=1 mt -f /dev/<yourtape> rew dd of=/tmp/foo2 bs=32k if=/dev/<yourtape> count=1 diff /tmp/foo /tmp/foo2
