unable to read a volume header

[Mel_12]

Hi, I am using HP DAT DRIVE HP35480 2GB DATA COMPRESSION TAPE DRIVE. Fbackup has always worked until recently. First, the machine ate up the tapes even after dry cleaning and later wet cleaning. Does anybody know if this is the end of life for this device or could it be fixed in any way? I need your advice on how best to get this thing to resume work again.
Thanks
Mel

[Pete Randall]

Mel,

That drive is very old. It sounds to me like it's time to call in the replacements.

By the way, what exactly is "wet cleaning"? I'm hoping it doesn't involve a sink.


Pete

[John Carr_2]

Hi

it sounds like its past its sell by date being a DDS1 drive we are now on to DDS4 drives !

you can probably get a cheap replacement but getting it fixed would not be feasible

:-) John.

[Mel_12]

Thanks guys for your advice. I'll have the management replace it. By the way, "cleaning is simply dropping a few drops of those cleaning solutions into a tape cleaner. It did not help.
Regards,
Mel

[Bill Hassell]

DDS drives should be completely replaced after 3-4 years of service. The HP35480 is extemely old, way past it's replacement date. It appears that HP no longer has any replacement drives. Now it is VERY important to note that fbackup will always report the message "unable to read a volume header" on a new tape or an old tape where the beginning of the tape is not in fbackup format. This message means: "This tape was not previously recorded using fbackup" That's not an error, just information.

So before you throw out the old drive, make sure you can do a simple backup using tar:

tar cvx /dev/rmt/0m /tmp

and then see if you can read the table of contents:

tar tvf /dev/rmt/0m

If you can read the tape without "I/O error" or errno 5, then the drive is probably OK. Verify by using fbackup to backup a small directory like /tmp. Run the command twice. The first time it may report the information message about the header, but if it completes without any errors, run it again and the header message will no longer appear. That's because the tape now has an fbackup header.

And to check the contents of an fbackup tape, use frecover -N which does an excellent job of verifying that the contents of each record matches the fbackup generated checksum.

[Mel_12]

Bill,
Thanks for your detailed advice on this topic. I had powered the tape down and hoping for a replacement. After reading from you, I powered it backup only to find out the machine once again ate the tape. I did not even get the chance to try your suggestions. Any more suggestiongs before I scrap it?
Thanks
Mel

[Tim Sanko]

Get a new drive.

Use the old one for the accounting package.

Suggest the accountant recover from the tape...


Have some fun with it.. Merry Christmas.

Tim

[Bill Hassell]

DDS tape drives have extremely small parts and will definitely wear out and get dirty beyond what the cleaning tape can handle. Since this is a critical device to insure the safety of your data, treat it accordingly. There's nothing to fix, just toss it before it destroys an irreplaceable tape and get a new one, perhaps a DDS3. The DDS3 will read the older tapes but you need to use DDS3 media for a futher backups.

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Mel

Use it as a door stop/paper weight/coffee cup rest, but not for backup tapes.


Time for a new one.

Paula