# SCSI tape problems 7.4-PRERELEASE, 8.2RC1



## trev (Feb 5, 2011)

A saga of woe. My scheduled backups on the 1st of the month failed, which is to say dump dumped, but restore claimed the dumps were not dump tapes. I also tried a backup tape from 3 months ago, same issue. Sometimes, on the third or fourth attempt, restore will read the tape, then fail on the next attempt.

Weird errors like:


```
root@shadow [/root] $ restore tv
Verify tape and initialize maps
Tape block size is 32
Dump   date: Sat Feb  5 16:56:24 2011
Dumped from: the epoch
Level 0 dump of / on shadow.sentry.org:/dev/ad4s1a
Label: none
unknown tape header type 0
abort? [yn] n
resync restore, skipped 18 blocks
Cannot find file dump list
```


```
root@shadow [/root] $ restore tv
Verify tape and initialize maps
Tape block size is 32
Dump   date: Sat Feb  5 16:56:24 2011
Dumped from: the epoch
Level 0 dump of / on shadow.sentry.org:/dev/ad4s1a
Label: none
unknown tape header type 0
abort? [yn] n
resync restore, skipped 3 blocks
Extract directories from tape
. is not on the tape
Root directory is not on tape
abort? [yn] n
Initialize symbol table.
. is not on the tape
```

So this is what I did with no improvement after each step:

1) clean the drive (twice);
2) replace the 6 month old tape with a brand new one;
3) replace the SCSI cable;
4) replace the SCSI host adapter card;
5) replace the tape drive with a brand new one;
6) recompile the operating system from the current RELENG_7 sources;
7) upgrade from 7.4-PRERELEASE to 8.2-RC1 (via CDROM and source).
8) the current 8.2-RC3 is compiling as I type, but I'm not hopeful.
   [Edit: 8.2-PRERELEASE, same issue ]

Hardware
========

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-M720-US3, Phenom 9550, 4Gb DDR2
SCSI host adapters: Adaptec 2940U2W (first) 29160 (second)
Tape drives: HP StorageWorks DAT72 Tape Autoloader (first) Seagate DDS4 (second)
Hard drives: 2x WDC WD5000AAKS-00A7B2 SATA 500Gb
Video card: GeForce GT 220 PCI-E
PSU: Antec Truepower Trio 550 watt

The last time it worked (1 January) it was using an ASUS A8V motherboard and FreeBSD 7.1-STABLE which was a temporary measure until I bought a new Phenom-capable motherboard because the previous Gigabyte motherboard went up in flames after the video card failed, the motherboard copper tracks superheated and the varnish caught fire.

Apart from the tape problems, the system had been running without any issues for the last 26 days.

Any ideas?


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