From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Nov 3 8:53:15 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail.qualitynet.net (mail.qualitynet.net [195.226.224.73]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 14B3E14E57 for ; Wed, 3 Nov 1999 08:52:58 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from allbean@mail.qualitynet.net) Received: from mail.qualitynet.net(as16-74.qualitynet.net[195.39.155.74]) (2100 bytes) by mail.qualitynet.net via sendmail with P:esmtp/R:inet_hosts/T:smtp (sender: ) id for ; Wed, 3 Nov 1999 19:53:18 +0300 (GMT) (Smail-3.2.0.103 1998-Oct-9 #11 built 1999-Jan-4) Message-ID: <38206728.1AFE72B6@mail.qualitynet.net> Date: Wed, 03 Nov 1999 19:47:36 +0300 From: Bean/Allie X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.51 [en] (Win95; I) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: 4mm tape drive - tape reading problems Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I work at an office where data from various vendors are provided to us on 4mm datatapes. We have a new tape drive that does not seem to be reading EOF messages (wild guess on my part). The datatape will start to read, then never stop until the file size fills its available disk space. I have very little hardware background. I'm an ex-pat working in Kuwait Oil company, so our "computer support" is almost non-existent. Any strategies you could provide on trouble shooting this problem would be af great help. I came across this site while surfing the web. If this request is inappropriate, I apologize. If you are still reading, here is some more background info. We are trying to load data ( LIS or LAS format) from the 4mm drive to UNIX files on Sun Solaris machines. To do this, I am using canned UNIX scripts that write the data from tape to a UNIX file. We have several older tape drives in our office that can read these datatapes properly. The newest drive cannot. As suggested above, with the new drive, the script appears to start reading the data, the UNIX file keeps getting larger and larger until the disk is full or until I CNTL-C to stop the process. I doesn't appear that any real data is being written into the UNIX file. I have asked our vendors for info on what kinds of tape drives they are using to write the tapes, but that request seemed to stymie them. Again, any strategies or pointed questions that I can ask them ( or our own support group) would be appreciated. Thank you Clarke Bean allbean@qualitynet.net lbea@kockw.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message