Using vdump on 8mm Exabyte 8505 Tape drives.

From: Jim Fitzmaurice <jpfitz_at_fnal.gov>
Date: Fri, 09 Apr 1999 15:46:42 -0500

Hello Managers,
    I have a DEC 3000 M400 running DU4.0B I am trying to get vdump to run,
but I keep getting the following errors on my Exabyte 8mm 8505 tape drives:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------

bl ./sbin/it.d/bin/doconfig _at_-> ../../../usr/sbin/doconfig
bd ./sbin/it.d/23.d/
bl ./sbin/swapdefault _at_-> ../dev/rz8b
bf ./sbin/pax, 122880

vdump: unable to write to device </dev/nrmt0h>; [5] I/O error
vdump: do you want to retry? y
bf ./sbin/sh, 270336

vdump: unable to write to device </dev/nrmt0h>; [5] I/O error
vdump: do you want to retry? y

vdump: unable to write to device </dev/nrmt0h>; [5] I/O error
vdump: do you want to retry? n
#
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------

Initially, I would get the error immediately. I checked the archives and
found four references to the same error.
The first one changed his tape drive with a spare one. I don't have a spare
one and the tape drives work with tar and cpio, it's just vdump that has
these errors, and its the same on both of my 8mm drives.
The second one I found dealt with bad tapes, I tried new tapes and even
cleaned the drives but no luck, same error.
The third on added the command "mt -f /dev/rmt0h online" to his script,
tried it, no dice.
The fourth one deleted the devices, re-made them and rebooted. It sounded
promising, but that didn't work for me either.
I began experimenting on my own with block size (-b) and number of buffers
(-F). I have 64MB of memory maybe vdump by default needs more. By trial and
error I found I could get vdump to backup a very small (1MB) AdvFS with the
block size of 16 (-b 16) and 4 (-F 4) memory buffers. Unfortunately when I
tried to do the root file system it started to go just fine then blew up as
shown above. I've other variations on the block sizes and buffer numbers but
I can't seem to make any headway. I've tried various options, including
compression (-C), quiet-errors only (-q), verbose (-v), -D as well as -0
and -u and even -T. I've tried different densities for the devices high
(rmt0h), medium (rmt0m), and low (rmt0l), and even the "no-rewind" devices.
That's about it. Is there something I'm missing? Does anybody have any more
ideas? I've run out.

Jim Fitzmaurice
jpfitz_at_fnal.com

UNIX is very user friendly, it's just very particular about who it makes
friends with.
Received on Fri Apr 09 1999 - 20:49:11 NZST

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