On Wed, 17 May 2000, Danijel Pajur wrote:
...
> I'd like to point out that neither the tape or the drive are at fault, both
> work flawlessly on a Windows NT system.
Have you tested it with multiple tape backups in NT ?
> When doing backups with tar it reports the following error: Cannot write to
> /dev/st0: Input/output error. Log is being filled with: "kernel: st0: Error
> with sense data: [valid=0] Info fld=0x0, Deferred st09:00: sense key Medium
> Error" and "Additional sense indicates Sequential positioning error".
>
This comes from the drive, it can't position the tape correctly and tells
that the medium is bad. This looks like a problem with the drive. NT may
use it in a different way and this is why it does not report any error.
You can try to disable write-behind and asynchronous writes and see if
this helps. If you do this, the driver does not try to write anything
after the first indication of end of medium.
> When the first problem occured the "clean" led of the tape drive was
> flashing (the drive was cleaned regularly), and a cleaning cartridge took
> care of that but I'm wondering if the flashing light meant something else
> instead of "clean me"..
>
The cleaning light may just tell that the drive has found an excessive
number of errors. Most often this is caused by dirty heads but it can be
something else, too.
> After checking out the drive options with mt stoptions I get the following:
> kernel: st0: Mode 0 options: buffer writes: 0, async writes: 0, read ahead:
> 0
> kernel: st0: can bsr: 0, two FMs: 0, fast mteom: 0, auto lock: 0,
> kernel: st0: defs for wr: 0, no block limits: 0, partitions: 0, s2 log: 0
> kernel: st0: sysv: 0
>
> now this seems a bit strange that all options are zero'ed.. could it be that
> the kernel "lost" the drive options and that they need to be set manually?
The command 'mt stoptions' sets the options to what you tell it to set
them. You have just set all options to zero ;-) If you just want to see
what the options are, you can use stclearoptions or stsetoptions.
Kai
