HP VS80 1/8 autoloader under HP-UX 11.11

[Rakesh Kapoor]

I have an external VS80 autoloader tape device which uses DLTtape IV media. It's configured and ioscan shows it as under:

Partial listing:
tape VS80 H/W Path 0/4/1/0/4/0.5.0
Description=======HP C9264CB-
/dev/rmt/1m
/dev/rmt/1mb
/dev/rmt/1mn
/dev/rmt/1mnb

Sam can see this device under backup and recovery ( interactive .. as
0/4/1/0/4/0.5.0 HP C9264CB-VS80 (Tape Device)

But when I try to backup using fbackup, i get the following error:
output file /dev/rmt/1m is not a valid device file for backup
If I try "tar" to back up, I get this error:
tar: cannot open /dev/rmt/1m

I have all the current scsi patches and the driver scmgr is in active state.

For some reasons, the system can't access /dev/rmt/1m.
HP tech support is working on this and I have no luck so far and am unable to use this device. very frustrating !

Need help.

Thanks.

Rakesh

[Denver Osborn]

A tape was manually loaded in that drive (either w/ mc or from the dlt lib's front pannel), right? SAM won't use the robot and do it for you...

can you post the ioscan output?

-denver

[Rakesh Kapoor]

Thanks for the advice. Yes, the tape was loaded using the import function of front panel command. If that is the case, what should I do? The tape is first loaded to the drive and then imported to the desired slot. There are 8 slots and I have 3 tapes loaded in slot #s 1,2 and 3. Import command just do both the above said functions. There is also load and unload function available under the front panel display. I was told by the technician to use import or export function to load or unload the tape since load and unload funtions deal with only the drive and not the slots. I am really confused about this loading/unloading?
What should be the right procedure?
Do you want the ioscan for tape unit or the whole system? I can post either if that helps you troubleshooting my problem.
I really appreciate your effort to uncover this mystery and helping me out!

Thanks a lot!

Rakesh,
Denver, Colorado

[Vincent Fleming · Accepted solution]

Import/export is for putting tapes into/out of the tape slots.

Once in the autoloader, the tapes can be inserted into the tape drive itself with the load/unload commands.

It sounds like you didn't load a tape into the drive.

Regards,

Vince

[Rakesh Kapoor]

You are right. Once I used the Load option from the panel, fbackup took off. Sam alsobacked up the data but failed at the end with this message:
fbackup(3013): WRITE ERROR while writing data record, at media record 71419
fbackup(3102): attempting to make this volume salvagable
fbackup(3123): could not read the previous checkpoint record
fbackup(3105): writing 2 EOFs and rewinding the tape
fbackup(3106): please mount a good tape

I used a brand new tape and did not expect any write errors. fbackup from command line did not complain and finished the backup correctly. Even the tar command backed it up correctly and did not complain.

What's the deal with SAM's backup?

Thanks.