Please excuse the following essay, but I'm feeling
a bit frustrated!
I left a linux box in my previous job, along with
a sensible backup strategy ("All you have to do is
put a tape in the drive on Friday, and take it out
on Monday morning, and rotate the tapes from week
to week"). (The tape drive is an Iomega Ditto Easy
3200, attatched to a Ditto Dash controller.)
They contacted me last week to say that the
computer was no longer working, and when I dropped
by it was obvious that the hard disk had died, so
I got them to buy a new one. This weekend I
installed redhat-6.0 on the new 10Gb disk they had
bought, compiled a new kernel with the ftape
module disitrbuted with the 2.2.5 kernel, added
the appropriate lines to conf.modules, and started
a restore. The first files were reappearing on
the new disk, when I realised that the tape I had
in the drive was an old one (I didn't want to
experiment with their latest backup), so I hit
Ctrl-C a few times, waited for the driver to
rewind the tape (keeping an eye on
/var/log/messages), and replaced the old tape with
the latest backup. But now the drive didn't go
through the motions of recognising the new tape
(winding back and forth to read the tape header
when the tape is inserted), it just sat there
with its arms folded, and in the log I got:
May 3 16:18:16 hm-jampc kernel: [028] ftape-ctl.c (ftape_get_drive_status) - error
status set.
May 3 16:18:16 hm-jampc kernel: [029] ftape-io.c (ftape_report_error_R999edffd) -
errorcode: 20.
May 3 16:18:16 hm-jampc kernel: [030] zftape-read.c (check_read_access) - tape is
not formatted.
May 3 16:18:17 hm-jampc kernel: [031] zftape-init.c (zft_close) - _zft_close failed.
The drive won't recognize any of the tapes, so I
assume that it's busted. (I Tried leaving the
computer switched off for an hour to no effect.
I think this computer must have been struck by
lightning or something.)
So now I guess I need to tell them to buy a new
tape drive! However, they now have a bigger hard
disk, and Iomega don't make the Ditto Easy 3200
drives any more, so I'm wondering if there is a
new drive with larger capacity which will read the
data off their old Travan 1.6/3.2 tape, and which
functions well under Linux. Any suggestions? I
was looking at the HP Colorado drives (5, 8 and
14Gb), but they seem to say on their web site that
only the 5 and 8 Gb drives can read 3.2 tapes
under (cringe) Windows.
All advice gratefully received, James
James G.R. Gilbert
The Sanger Centre
Wellcome Trust Genome Campus
Hinxton
Cambridge Tel: 01223 494906
CB10 1SA Fax: 01223 494919
