DDS3 Tape Problem

[L Gene Levy]

I'm embarrassed to be asking this with all my
experience, but it's a first for me....
I installed a 12/24 DAT -- C1537 w/a Compaq
label into my SuSE 9.3 linux system. I have
lots of data I need to move to my new 10.0
system, but not all. I want to save the data I
don't want to move, delete it, then copy the
rest to the new system...
Problem is : neither SusE 9.3 or 10.0 want to
access the drive. My v7.x and 9.3 worked with
my old DDS2 ( which I no longer have ).
LTT starts diags on device 0.7.0 dev/sg7.
After about 3 minutes LTT says
"Reading Data From drive device"
Then just sits there...

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated...

[Kodjo Agbenu]

Hi,

I'm using a C1537 DAT 12/24 connected via awith OpenSuSE 10.1 : tar works perfectly.

=> Is your drive correctly detected ?
=> Are you sure you are using the right device file ?
=> Did you try to clean the drive ?

Pls post extracts from dmesg, lspci, cat /proc/scsi/scsi, ...

Good lcuk.
Kodjo

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

My first suggestion would be take a look at lscpi and dmesg and see if there is any evidence the hardware is there.

Check the SCSI ID does not conflict with other hardware and that everything is plugged in and has power.

Are there lights on the drive? Does it operate at all, eg accept and eject tapes.

SEP

[L Gene Levy]

Kodjo and Steven :
I've been a sysadmin for nearly 25 years
doing contract work. You know that means all
kinds of hardware under nearly all kinds of
circumstances...
But here goes :
(Nearly 2k of data follows )

At boot the Adaptec 2940 bios detects all the disks and the tape ( as device 7 ).
the drive itself runs the initialization diags - ie - running the tape forward
and rewinding the tape.
I can manually eject the tape and when I insert it, the drive reads the tape
and then rewinds to BOT.


dmesg shows :
<4>(scsi0:A:7): 10.000MB/s transfers (10.000MHz, offset 15)
<5> Vendor: HP Model: C1537A Rev: L708
<5> Type: Sequential-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02

lspci shows :
0000:00:10.0 SCSI storage controller: Adaptec AHA-2940/2940W / AIC-7871 (rev 03)
Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B-
Status: Cap- 66Mhz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- SERR- Latency: 32 (2000ns min, 2000ns max), cache line size 08
Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 5
Region 0: I/O ports at dc00 [disabled]
Region 1: Memory at d6001000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable)

I've got it set to device 15 so that I have a linear device space.
I have 14 73GB disks, 1-6, 8-14, and the tape drive at device 7.

lin93001:~ # ls -l /proc/scsi/scsi
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 Aug 22 15:46 /proc/scsi/scsi

This looks normal

lin93001:~ # ls -l /dev/tape
total 178
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 72 Feb 2 2006 .
drwxr-xr-x 36 root root 181976 Aug 22 15:27 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 104 Aug 22 15:27 by-path
lin93001:~ # ls -l /dev/tape/by-path
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 104 Aug 22 15:27 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 72 Feb 2 2006 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Aug 22 15:27 pci-0000:00:10.0-scsi-0:0:7:0-generic -> ../../sg0
lin93001:~ # ls -l /dev/st0
crw-rw-rw- 1 root disk 9, 0 Mar 19 2005 /dev/st0
lin93001:~ # ls -l /dev/rmt0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Jan 25 2006 /dev/rmt0 -> st0
lin93001:~ # ls -l /dev/sg0
crw-r----- 1 root disk 21, 0 Mar 19 2005 /dev/sg0
lin93001:~ #

These all look normal.
Both of the lights flicker when first powered
on and tape spins.
The switches on the bottom are all ON except
3 - it is OFF.
The ID tag has the following :
Part No : C1537-20485
WWYY
1899
P/N: 242401-001
Serial: GB00483160 Revision:3842

I have tried both a Maxell HS-4/125s
and a Sony DGD125P.
Both taoes are labeled DDS3.
Both tapes have Media Recognition System
bars on them ( I manually wound and rewound
the tapes to verify this.

Now you see why I'm stumped...

Thanks for the reply, and I hope the
above will give you a clue I have missed.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Putting the tape device on the same scsi chain as disk is going to significantly impact throughput to and from the drive.

For the sake of clarity, I suggest you move the device into a simple test system where it has a scsi card all to itself.

Make sure the pin set scsi id is anything but zero.

Do a cold Suse Install and see if it works. If yes, try the same general setup in the working system.

Its possible the tape drive is just bad.

SEP

[L Gene Levy]

Steve,
It's possible the drive is bad.
But that doesn't explain why LTT starts and
runs some diagnostics, then hangs when it
attempts to "Read data from drive device" .
I downloaded LTT v4.1 hoping it would tell
me I have an unreadable tape or something. But
it just sits there...
Any ideas on why LTT hangs ?