replacement DLT drive not working

[Fred Martin_1]

Our external DLT70 tape drive (C5658A) started misbehaving. "Clean" light came on every day, etc.

So, HP came and swapped out the drive last night, with another C5658A. We set the address of the replacement drive to be the same as the previous drive.

While HP was here, we did an ioscan; saw the drive as expected. I even did a cpio read from tape, to get a file listing. That worked.

Came in this morning, and my backup (cpio) had failed. Now, I can't reach the drive at all:

# mt rew
/dev/rmt/c4t1d0BEST: No such device or address

ioscan still shows the drive.

What would the next step be, to hunt this one down?

[Pete Randall]

Fred,

Does ioscan show the device files, in particular /dev/rmt/c4t1d0BEST? Did you use a device file in your mt rew command - it should have defaulted to /dev/rmt/0m!


Pete

[Fred Martin_1]

Pete, yes to both. Another odd thing, since I posted this - it seems to be working now. Did another 'mt rew' and the dang thing worked. At the moment I'm writing about 12 GB to the tape and will verify it after.

I hate it when that happens.

[Pete Randall]

Fred,

You're right - I hate it when something starts mysteriously working with no explanation!


Pete

[Patrick Wallek]

Verify that all cables are plugged in and seated tightly. If there are thumbs screws to secure the cable, use them.

A cable that is not quite secure can make things kind-of work.

[Jakes Louw]

Sounds like a SCSI cable to me: if that dang thing isn't in properly, then all types of funnies happen.