RS/6000, 150Mbyte tapes and cpio

[Kevin P. Kleinfelter]

geoff at edm.uucp (Geoff Coleman) writes:


>	Help
>Is there a known problem with RS6000s running either Golden Code or
>9013 when using cpio with a 150Mbyte cartridge tape. We are experiencing
>semi-duplicatable problems with this combination on our machines.
>	By semi I mean that we can get reads and writes to fail on the same 
>tape with the same data set but not always in the same place. We are
>using cpio -idumvcB to read in the tapes and it seems to get out of sync
>between cpio and the tape handler. If we use dd with bs=65536 it seems to
>work more consistently for reading in from tape. 
>	On output we use "cpio -ocvB" and get a write error part way into the
>tape (usually > 60000 blocks but not a repeatable number with the same tape).

Interesting...we are on Golden Code, and I have made two QIC tapes on another
machine (an AT&T 3B2); both failed in ABOUT the same place.  Since the 3B2
we have has been around a while, I though it was probably the culprit.
In our case it occurs well into a LARGE tape.
-- 
Kevin Kleinfelter @ Dun and Bradstreet Software, Inc (404) 239-2347
{emory,gatech}!nanovx!msa3b!kevin

"Don't hold your finger on the button if the motor ain't goin' roundy-roundy."