Hi All,
Many thanks to all those who helped me out with the ongoing saga of my
HP colorado 5GBe parallel port tape backup system - it NOW works
perfectly for dumping my laptop hardrive to tape - and 'restore -C'
seems to verify that everything on the tape is okay. Of course, the
*real* test will be when I have a disaster and have to restore the whole
system from tape:-)
ANYWAY - the problem I now have is with my desktop system. an Intel
desktop (PII 466mhz) with an Adaptec 2920 controller and an internal HP
Surestore (4/8 gig - 4 gig native) internal scsi Travan 4 tape
streamer...
As mentioned, my parallel port tape drive is now working fine (apart
from having to use windoze to erase/reinitialize tapes - 'mt -f /dev/pt0
erase' won't work as it is an 'unimplemented ioctl') BUT on my desktop
system:
I can use almost ANYTHING to back up to this tape drive - taper, Kdat,
dump,
tar, whatever - BUT, every time I start trying to do a VERIFY ('restore
-C' or whatever) it goes for about an hour, looks like everything is
okay, and then SUDDENLY STOPS - locks up - can't kill the process -
can't do anything - can't even access the tape drive again until I
reboot the system...
Bottom line: I *don't* know if I am getting a reliable backup of the
system or not - but chances are (I think), I'm not:-((
HELP!!:-)
I thought it *might* be something to do with blocksize - apparently the
wrong blocksize can cause verify/restore problems - so the last time I
tried using dump with the '-b 32' option (for 32kb blocks) - even THIS
hasn't made a difference (I think the backup might have streamed a bit
better/faster - 2 gig in about an hour
and 10 minutes - BUT, once again, its just locked up completely when
I've tried to do the verify (restore -C)...
Hoping someone out there has the answer/can help:-)
Thanks in advance.
John.
