Disaster in progress: disk is dying, tape doesn't work :-(

[Randy Gobbel]

Doug Ledford wrote:
> 
> Randy Gobbel wrote:
> > I just blew my entire weekend in a futile attempt to back up my system before
> > it becomes unuseable....
> 
> [etc.]
> 
> 
> 99% of the time if I have problems with a tape backup of any kind, it's a
> bad tape.
> 
> >  I'm not sure whether the tape is
> > really unreadable, or the software is broken.

Yep, turned out to be a bad TR4 cartridge.  You'd think at $40/tape, they'd
have better quality control, especially for media that can't be formatted by
the user.  Anyway, Imation has a pretty painless setup for replacing bad
cartridges, and I was able to reuse the tape from an earlier backup to get a
good tape of all of my Linux file systems, using tob (which uses afio).

  In 2.1.122, things are much
> > worse: dump gets all the way to the end, then hangs trying to close the tape.
> 
> This, I believe, is a bug in the 2.1.122 tape driver.

Or possibly a bug in dump, since afio seems to work fine.  Is is true,
however, that this was not a problem in 2.0.35.

> > All dumps were run in single-user mode.  The tape drive is a Conner (i.e.,
> > Seagate) CTT8000-S Travan TR4 drive, firmware 1.22...
> >
> > I could really use some hints about what SCSI parameters are most likely to be
> > right for a tape drive, re: disconnect and sync/async.
>
> Enable disconnection and sync negotiation.

Sure enough, that's what finally worked.  So much for Adaptec tech
support--they told me to use async and disable disconnect.  Given what that
does to the disk (lotsa timeouts), one has to wonder why they would suggest
disabling disconnect.  Oh well.

Hopefully the drive is under warranty.  It looks like the problem may be a
head crash, since all of the grown defects I can see are on the same head. 
Lots of power failures this summer.  I think I'll buy a UPS....

Thanks for the prompt replies to my mail, even just knowing folks are *trying*
to help is comforting when things are falling apart like this.

-Randy

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