In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
Note: the following is my reply to a private reply to my initial post regarding
my problem reading from my tape drive. I thought that this info might be
helpful on the mailing list as well.
Willem Riede <[email protected]> wrote:
> John Guthrie wrote:
> >
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Lately, I have been having problems reading from from my HP Colorado IDE
> > tape drive. I can use mt to get the status of the drive and to forward the
> > drive to a different file. I can even use tar to write to the tape.
> > But whenever I try to read the tar files that I have written to tape, I
> > get an I/O error, and there doesn't even seem to be any attempt by the
>
> Can you be more specific, and post exactly what commands you issued after
> inserting the tape, and what error you get when, including any log messages?
First, I run
mt rewind
just to get the tape back to the beginning. (I think that I may have /dev/tape
as asymlink to /dev/nht0, not /dev/ht0.) Then just as a test, I can do
something like
tar -cvf /dev/nht0 /boot
This command actually runs fine with no errors. If I then run
mt status
I get the output
SCSI 2 tape drive:
File number=0, block number=16841, partition=0.
Tape block size 512 bytes. Density code 0x0 (default).
Soft error count since last status=0
General status bits on (0):
At least the block number is non-zero as I should expect it to be since
I did the tar to /dev/nht0. If I then run
mt rewind; mt status
I get the output
SCSI 2 tape drive:
File number=0, block number=0, partition=0.
Tape block size 512 bytes. Density code 0x0 (default).
Soft error count since last status=0
General status bits on (0):
So now the block number is at 0, which is good since I did just rewind the
thing. At this point, I would expect (perhaps mistakenly) that I should
be able to run the following
tar -tf /dev/ht0
The output of this command is
tar: /dev/ht0: Cannot read: Input/output error
tar: At beginning of tape, quitting now
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
>
> > driver to read the tape. This is currently happening under 2.4.5, and
> > has been happening undeer at least 2.4.2 and 2.4.3, I think it was also
> > happening under 2.4.1 as well.
>
> Can you verify that (by rebooting to previous kernels if you still have them)?
> Does it happen with all your tapes?
This is the same error that I have gotten from both 2.4.2 and 2.4.3. It
definitely happens with all of my tapes including my new ones. (Due to
circumstanes of my setup, I can't verify 2.4.1 this exact minute, but I can
get back to you on that.)
I am also getting the following lines of dmesg output:
ide-tape: Reached idetape_chrdev_open
ide-tape: ht0: I/O error, pc = 8, key = 5, asc = 2c, ascq = 0
I don't know if this helps. Apparently IDETAPE_DEBUG_LOG is set to 1 by
default. Which actually results in a large number of copies of the first line.
I only get the second line when I try to open the tape for reading.
> Regards. Willem Riede.
John Guthrie
[email protected]
Upgrade to mt-st version .5b or greater. Older mt versions had known
bugs particularly with positioning. I suggest scsi emulation + scsi
tape rather than ATAPI tape.
rgds,
tim.
...
hdd: HP COLORADO 20GB, ATAPI TAPE drive
...
scsi0 : SCSI host adapter emulation for IDE ATAPI devices
scsi : 1 host.
Vendor: HP Model: COLORADO 20GB Rev: 4.01
Type: Sequential-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Detected scsi tape st0 at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
...
[17:12] abit:/etc/dump > mt -v
mt-st v. 0.5b
[17:12] abit:/etc/dump > tar --version | head -1
tar (GNU tar) 1.13.17
[17:12] abit:/etc/dump > ls -l /dev/tape
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Jul 14 2000 /dev/tape ->
nst0
[17:12] abit:/etc/dump > mt status
SCSI 2 tape drive:
File number=0, block number=0, partition=0.
Tape block size 512 bytes. Density code 0x47 (unknown to this mt).
Soft error count since last status=0
General status bits on (41010000):
BOT ONLINE IM_REP_EN
[17:12] abit:/etc/dump > tar cvf /dev/tape /boot
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
boot/
boot/kernel.h
boot/vmlinuz-2.2.14-12
boot/vmlinuz.prev
boot/System.map.prev
boot/linux-2.2.14-12
boot/linux-prev
boot/linux-2.2.20p6ai
boot/module-info
boot/boot.b
boot/chain.b
...
[17:12] abit:/etc/dump > mt status
SCSI 2 tape drive:
File number=1, block number=0, partition=0.
Tape block size 512 bytes. Density code 0x47 (unknown to this mt).
Soft error count since last status=0
General status bits on (81010000):
EOF ONLINE IM_REP_EN
[17:12] abit:/etc/dump > mt tell
At block 11421.
[17:12] abit:/etc/dump > mt rewind
[17:13] abit:/etc/dump > mt status
SCSI 2 tape drive:
File number=0, block number=0, partition=0.
Tape block size 512 bytes. Density code 0x47 (unknown to this mt).
Soft error count since last status=0
General status bits on (41010000):
BOT ONLINE IM_REP_EN
[17:13] abit:/etc/dump > mt tell
At block 0.
[17:13] abit:/etc/dump > tar tvf /dev/tape
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2001-06-25 22:21:52 boot/
-rw-r--r-- root/root 237 2001-05-03 23:04:36 boot/kernel.h
-r--r--r-- root/root 589225 2000-05-09 05:43:45
boot/vmlinuz-2.2.14-12
-rw-rw-r-- root/root 606292 2001-06-25 18:08:21 boot/vmlinuz.prev
-rw-rw-r-- root/root 195903 2001-06-25 18:08:21 boot/System.map.prev
lrwxrwxrwx root/root 0 2001-05-03 23:10:10 boot/linux-2.2.14-12
-> vmlinuz-2.2.14-12
lrwxrwxrwx root/root 0 2001-06-25 18:08:21 boot/linux-prev ->
vmlinuz.prev
lrwxrwxrwx root/root 0 2001-06-25 18:08:21 boot/linux-2.2.20p6ai
-> vmlinuz-2.2.20p6ai-0625-18:08:09
lrwxrwxrwx root/root 0 2000-04-10 21:15:54 boot/module-info ->
module-info-2.2.14-5.0
-rw-r--r-- root/root 4568 2000-02-02 14:03:10 boot/boot.b
-rw-r--r-- root/root 612 2000-02-02 14:03:10 boot/chain.b
...
[17:13] abit:/etc/dump > mt tell
At block 11420.
[17:14] abit:/etc/dump > mt status
SCSI 2 tape drive:
File number=0, block number=11420, partition=0.
Tape block size 512 bytes. Density code 0x47 (unknown to this mt).
Soft error count since last status=0
General status bits on (1010000):
ONLINE IM_REP_EN
[17:14] abit:/etc/dump > mt fsf 1
[17:14] abit:/etc/dump > mt tell
At block 11421.
[17:14] abit:/etc/dump > mt status
SCSI 2 tape drive:
File number=1, block number=0, partition=0.
Tape block size 512 bytes. Density code 0x47 (unknown to this mt).
Soft error count since last status=0
General status bits on (81010000):
EOF ONLINE IM_REP_EN
--