Dale Worley wrote:
>
> I've been backing up for several years to an Exabyte 8200 tape drive
> on a SCSI interface. The usual sequence of operations is:
>
> It has always worked fine.
> I've tried various variations to space the tape forward, including "mt
> fsf", reading the tar, and "mt eod" (which seems to run forward to
> EOT, rather than to the double tapemark indicating the end of data).
Are you issuing these commands to the non-rewinding tape device
(/dev/nst0)? We can write, scan, append, and fsf to a specific
fileset. Of course, the 8200 doesn't support LBA, so seek and tell
don't work. And there's no simple immediate mode erase, so it takes 2
hours to erase a 112M tape.
> At this point, I'm tempted to believe that there are serious bugs in
> either Linux 2.0.34, or in the Exabyte drive.
Keep in mind:
1: This drive is VERY old in tape drive years.
Have you had the drive serviced? How often do you clean it? How old
are the tapes you're using? Is the termination a passive or active type
(passive terminators degrade over time)? Have you checked the SCSI
cable for corrosion at the connectors?
We utilize an 8200 here (and have since 1992). We've run it under
0.99pl14, 1.0.9, 1.2.13, 1.3.47, 2.0.13, 2.0.35, 2.0.36 and now under
2.2.3. It works flawlessly using the default st drivers and a Buslogic
BT545 ISA host adapter. In fact, we torture the drive in ways that many
shops can only have nightmares about. Our secret - clean it regularly
and use good tapes.
--
Tim Jones [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Vice President Visit our tape backup web pages:
Enhanced Software Technologies, Inc. http://www.estinc.com/
