fbackup errors

[Tommy Beam]

Running HPUX 10.20 with a HP SureStore Dat8 tape drive.

Backups error out at different interval with this error.

"WRITE ERROR while writing a checkpoint EOF, at media (a #)"
"attempting to make this volume salvagable.
writing 2 EOFs and rewinding tape.
please mount a good tape."

We have changed out the tape drive, bought new tapes, and shortened the backups. We had about 9 tapes that were working fine in the drive but they too have stopped working.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Stefan Farrelly]

Very interesting. We get these sort of errors all the time, usually only 2 possibilities;

1. Tape is bad. Using a brand new/another tape and cleaning the drive almost always fixes it.
2. Tape drive is bad. Replacement will fix it.

But you seem to have tried this. Do you have any spare brand new tapes at the moment ? If you do can you try one to see if it fixes it. When you had the tape drive swapped out are you sure you got a brand new one and not a refurbished one ? We had this happen once before, got a refurbished drive which only lasted a week then same problem.

The only other thing to check is your checkpoint frequency in your fbackup config file, maybe its too small. We use this config file;

blocksperrecord 128
records 32
checkpointfreq 256
readerprocesses 4
maxretries 1
retrylimit 0
maxvoluses 1000

[Michael Tully]

Does the drive work okay with tar or cpio?

Is the firmware the same level as the old drive? Sometimes when a drive is replaced it has an older firmware version than what was replaced previously.

Regards
Michael
"When I have trouble spelling, it's called fat finger syndrome."

[Tommy Beam]

my fbackup_config is:
blocksperrecord 32
records 32
checkpointfreq 32
readerprocesses 2
maxretries 5
retrylimit 5000000
maxvoluses 100

We are on our 2nd refurbished drive in 2 months. New tapes give the same error.

[Stefan Farrelly]

Its either firmware or try increasing the checkpointfrequency from 32 to 256 and see if you have the same problem. 32 is pretty small.

[Steve Steel]

Hi

Make sure that

PHCO_23861: s700_800 10.20 fbackup(1M)/frecover(1M) cumulative patch

Is on the machine.

Then change your config file to the one shown as a test

Some of your values are very low


Steve Steel