posted this last night right when the LQ DB went south, apparently the record was stored but no body... like others have said downtime with LQ is impressively minimal.
hey linuxers,
having never used a tape drive in the past i was surprised to find that
standard tape drives aren't typically mounted like HD's... either i
can't get it to work (spent 3 days on it) or i gotta RMA it but would
really appreciate any possible pointers from somebody that has run tape
drives successfully in linux (am running rh9, interfacing SDX-500 with
adaptec 19160 and also tried a 2940-u2w, both using a new adaptec u160
cable)
upon first boot after installation of the Sony SDX-500 tape drive, all
seemed well, e.g. no flashing lights. But all attempts to write to the
drive (at /dev/st0 and /dev/nst0) with both tar and dump resulted in a
generic 'I/O error'. additionally, `mt -f /dev/st0 status` yields a
similar I/O error. To ensure /dev/st0 indeed points to the tape drive,
writes were attempted to /dev/st1 and higher tape numbers. These write
attempts all produced a different error; since the error at st0 is
unique i assume the tape drive is there. additionally, dmesg |grep tape
says a tape drive was found on the SCSI bus and `cat /proc/scsi/scsi`
shows the drive.
After the first write attempt, all three LEDs on the drive face flash at
50% on, 50% off (timing matters according to manual). But the manual (
found at
http://www.allaw.com.au/Docs/SDX-500C.pdf ) makes no mention
of all three lights flashing.
so i found tapes are serial devices but was never successful at writing
to it. i'm hoping if i RMA it the next one might cooperate but suspect
I may have missed some key operation, e.g. formatting which i'm pretty
sure doesn't need to be done to a standard tape drive.
any comments would be appreciated.
thx, - bp
