Am 17.05.2013 02:56, schrieb Zaphod Beeblebrox: > On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 8:30 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <g...@freebsd.org>wrote: > >> On Thursday, 16 May 2013 at 19:56:14 -0400, Zaphod Beeblebrox wrote: >>> On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 5:08 PM, Bob Bishop <r...@gid.co.uk> wrote: >>>> On 16 May 2013, at 21:51, Zaphod Beeblebrox wrote: >>>> >> >> > [about my tape drive not working] > > >> The obvious question: can you write tapes and read them back? My >> experience with DDS tapes was of extreme unreliability. The age >> doesn't make things any easier. >> > > Well... therein lies my other suspicion. I don't have any DDS4 tapes to > try writing, but the DDS3 tapes I have fail to write. > > ... but they don't even try. The tape spools up when inserted and "mt > offl" works (ejects the tape) and the drive doesn't indicate any error at > this point --- but it doesn't even try to start moving for either read or > write.
Have you used dd, tar, or pax, to actually write data? I suppose newer DDS drives would not actually engage the tape to their head drum until you were actually reading/writing, in order to reduce wear and tear of tape and heads. Not that it helps you now: Personally, after a few first steps with DDS1DC and DDS2, I dropped helical scan stuff because I often found that I could read tapes only on the same drive that had written them (I had three drives around in the late 1990s/early 2000); no matter if the heads were cleaned or not, and I moved on going for for optical disks and linear tape (which includues MLR/SLR, DLT, SuperDLT, LTO; personally I used SLR2, SLR4DC and SLR6 aka SLR24). _______________________________________________ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
