ioctl Error on Tape Drive

[Scott Buckingham]

This question is in regards to a Sun box running Solaris 8.

Last week, I was able to perform a backup of one of the filesystem on our Sun box. I used the tar command for this and it worked just fine. Today, I was trying to do this again today but this time (using the same device, /dev/rmt/2) the tape drive is not accessed and it appears that my files are simply being written out to a file called /dev/rmt/2. Running an mt command on this device reveals:
mt: inappropriate ioctl for device

What happened to my tape drive?

[Andrew Merritt_2]

Scott,

You might want to try a forum that suppports Sun systems. ITRC is for HP systems, and I don't see any mentioned in your question which appears to be related to an ioctl call on Solaris 8.

Andrew

[Devender Khatana]

Hi,

This is a common problem. Just check wheather the SCSI ID has not got changed since last backup. If the SCSI ID of drive got changed then it might require different device file rather than /dev/rmt/2.Just check
#ls -l /dev/rmt/*

& try to check how many drives you have and how many device files. Try to access device through some other device files or follow procedure to create new device files ( On SUN I do not know).

The file being created with this file name means that the device was not accessible through this device file when backup was fired.

HTH,
Devender

[Scott Buckingham]

I found a solution to my problem. Using devfsadm -c tape -v on our Solaris box rebuilds the device to what it is. It seems that using ufsdump (Solaris' backup command) when not in single-user mode corrupts the device somehow.

Thanks for your replies.