Tape Drive Problems

[Jerry McAllister]

> 
> Hi,
> 
> I have a Dell PowerEdge server with a RAID 5 and a SCSI tape drive. For the
> past two years, the tape drive has worked fine. All of the sudden I get:
> 
>   DUMP: Date of this level 0 dump: Mon Jun 16 01:00:00 2003
>   DUMP: Date of last level 0 dump: the epoch
>   DUMP: Dumping /dev/aacd0s1a (/) to /dev/sa0
>   DUMP: mapping (Pass I) [regular files]
>   DUMP: mapping (Pass II) [directories]
>   DUMP: estimated 297479 tape blocks.
>   DUMP: Cannot open output "/dev/sa0".
>   DUMP: fopen on /dev/tty fails: Device not configured
>   DUMP: The ENTIRE dump is aborted.
> 
> When doing a dump. mt status shows:
> 
> server1# mt -f /dev/sa0 status
> mt: /dev/sa0: Input/output error

It could be due to just a dirty tape and/or heads, but we have a bunch
of Dell Poweredge servers and occasionally they seem to get in to a weird
condition that looks like this and that seems to require a complete power 
removal to free up.  We have people shut them down and even completely 
remove the power cord and let them set and discharge for a bit - several 
(10 ??) minutes and then restart things.   Often this helps.

We recommend using the cleaning cartridges as rarely as possible - they
seem to abraid the heads, but once in a while stuff gets built up and 
you just have to do it.  Then run one twice and try with a good condition 
(new maybe) tape.

If those two things do not cure it, then you probably need to 
replace the drive or some of the related hardware such as the
SCSI controller.
.
////jerry

> 
> Does this sound like a scsi bus problem, or perhaps a bad drive? Anything I
> can do to tell for sure what the problem is? Thanks,
> 
> Joe
> 
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