Date: Sat, 4 Nov 1995 13:49:46 +0100 (MET) From: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey) To: julian@ref.tfs.com (Julian Elischer) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: More nits Message-ID: <199511041249.NAA18974@allegro.lemis.de> In-Reply-To: <199511011940.LAA23130@ref.tfs.com> from "Julian Elischer" at Nov 1, 95 11:40:31 am
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Julian Elischer writes:
>
> > > 2. The SCSI tape driver will rewind a non-rewinding tape under some
> > > circumstances (I think it's when it detects an EOM). I have a tape
> > > with multiple files which is readable, but the second-to-last tape
> > > mark seems to be flaky and an 'mt fsf 3' tends to go one mark too
> > > far. It was a real pain trying to read in the tape, since the
> > > driver kept rewinding it.
> >
> > Hmmmmm! I'll let some of the SCSI hackers on our list field this one.
> > I don't actually use tapes in my daily life, so I've no direct
> > experience with this behavior.
>
> I have a problem with this..
> it might be the drive itself.....
> I don't think WE ask it to do that....
I'm pretty sure that it's the driver. I finally got this tape read by
using BSD/OS, which doesn't show the behaviour.
A couple of other points that were mentioned:
1. What kind of tape drive? HP 35480A. I haven't had any problems
with it before; I don't know what made it write the flaky tape
mark.
2. Why not rewrite the tape? From what? This is the only backup.
Sure, it's a good objective to ensure that you have good tapes
(and, in fact, once I restored it, I *did* rewrite it), but that
doesn't mean that drivers shouldn't recover from as many errors as
possible.
3. J\(:org hasn't seen this problem before. You mention QIC-150s--do
you use them in non-rewinding mode? This question doens't make
any sense unless you're talking about /dev/nrstX--otherwise you'd
expect it to rewind when it closes.
Greg
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