HP DLT/80 tar/dd backup I/O Errors

[Justin Bennett]

Ok I just bought another HP DLT 40/80 GB Drive. This one I got a nice 4
bay rack mount array for it and everything. I have two existing 40/80 DLT
drives (diffrent model) that work great. However I just learned that any
tape that was used in my old drives won't work in the new drive, unless I
demagnetize them (from the manual of the drive) It was kicking my existing
tapes out opon insertion. This is strange because I didn't think there was
any type of formating on tapes, but there must be some kind of
initilization on the tape.
   Anyways thats not the issue, I bought a new set of tapes for this drive
and everything was working fine for a few days.  Now I get Input output
errors when writting to the tape. I use tar and dd to set the block
size.

tar -cf /dev/st0 proj --blocking-factor 128

This is backing the proj directory. I get

Thu Sep 26 00:00:10 EDT 2002

Tape 0 Projects
tar: /dev/st0: Wrote only 0 of 65536 bytes
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
Thu Sep 26 01:23:37 EDT 20021

Sometimes it runs as few as 7 minutes in this case about an
hour and a half. When I come in The clean/media light is blinking, I ran
the cleaning cartridge several time, I still get the same thing the next
night.

Any Ideas? Is an HP vs80 or something while the others are hp surestores,
the surestores work just fine. They are all on the same SCSI bus, but the
backups fire in sucsession, when one finishes the next goes, so I don't
think it's a bandwidth issue on the bus. The files are on another server
shared by nfs, on 100MBs FD switched network.

Justin
-- 
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Justin Bennett
Red Hat (Linux) Certified Engineer
Network Administrator
Dynabrade Inc.
8989 Sheridan Dr
Clarence, NY 14031
716-631-0100 ext 215