Hi,
I am getting an intermittent error on my LTO 3 drive. It is a HP StorageWorks 920 internal SCSI drive.
Sometimes backups work and sometimes tar will fail with this error:
tar: /dev/st3: Cannot write: Input/output error tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
I have tried 3 old tapes and one brand new tape. It has happened on all of them. I have also run two different cleaning cartridges through the drive.
Also it always fails in a different place. Sometimes it runs for 5 minutes when the error comes up, other times for an hour or so. sometimes not at all and the backup works.
If I look on the monitor connected to the server I see this error:
10:0:3:0 Error on write file mark
Does anyone know what this means exactly or what I should do? I read online that I should try cleaning the tape heads with isopropyl alcohol.
Paul
Once I had a similar problem with an external tape drive. I found out that it was a problem with at power supply not at tape drive. So maybe you should first check cables and connector. What’s about the scsii controller? Is only tape connected or also disks? If there are also disks and they work fine, then you can be sure that the controller is OK. The problem is that from the viewpoint of tar it sends an order to the black box composed of controller, cable, tape drive and tape and get back only “OK” of “fail”. So it’s difficult to find out where the problem really is if you are not so lucky to have spare parts and can change piece by piece… Peter -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org