HELP! DDS not accessible

[Ray Evans]

One of our systems died today. I'm currently trying to restore, but my tape drive is not available.

ioscan -fn sees it correctly and device files are in the /dev/rmt directory.

The tape drive had been working fine, don't think it's a hardware issue.

When I try to access it through SAM or the command line with frecover command I get the following:

# frecover -I /tmp/index -f /dev/rmt/2m
frecover(5403): Unable to open or identify device at /dev/rmt/2m

frecover(5432): Media rewind failed
frecover(5402): failed close on device /dev/rmt/2m
frecover(5404): Press return when the next volume is ready on /dev/rmt/2m:

Also, SAM gives me the following error when going into interactive restore area:

"SAM internal error.
The error code handler has gotten the error code of 1 of type NOTE with the associated strings:
10/4/16.4.0
HP C1537A

[Bruce Regittko_1]

Hi,

Can the drive read other tapes? If not, then the first thing I would try is a few mt commands.

mt -f /dev/rmt/2m eod # advance tape to the end
mt -f /dev/rmt/2m rew # rewind the tape
mt -f /dev/rmt/2m status

If these don't work, I would recreate the device files in case one is corrupt.

insf -eC tape

If this doesn't do the trick, I would begin to suspect either a scsi target address conflict, which can be ruled out with ioscan, or a hardware problem. Good luck,

--Bruce

[Ray Evans]

More info:

The 12 gig DDS (this is the one I'm trying to recover from) was originaly on an external bus (10/4/16.4) with a 4 gig DDS on the internal bus (10/12/5.0).
Once I restored the system off it's original tapes using the 12 gig drive, I then tried to recover my backup from the previous night.
That's when the problem surfaced.
I physically swapped the drives out and am now able to access the 12 gig on the internal bus, haven't tried the 4 gig on the external bus.