Topic: Seagate tape drive not working

[atlantis]

I have a Seagate STT22000A rev. 8a51 tape drive installed in my E-Smith 5.6 machine but I just can't get it working.

mt tell gives the following answer:

/dev/tape: Input/output error
mt: The device is offline (not powered on, no tape ?).

mt -f /dev/tape status says

SCSI 2 tape drive:
File number=-1, block number=-1, partition=0.
Tape block size 0 bytes. Density code 0x0 (default).
Soft error count since last status=0
General status bits in (10000):
 IM_REP_EN

What can I do to get it working? As far as I know my drive is one of the few which is officially said to be working with E-Smith. The drive itself makes some noise and the light goes blink-blink after inserting a tape, which is normal with these drives.

Is there anybody out there who can give me a clue? Please...

Atlantis

[Lloyd Keen]

Is this a travan drive or a dds drive? Are there any jumpers on the drive?

[atlantis]

Hi Lloyd,

It is a Travan 10/20 drive, and there are only jumpers for master/slave/cable select. At the moment it is jumpered as master and is hooked up to the second ide channel with the cdrom being slave.

Atlantis

[Trevor TDB]

Atlantis,

One thing to check is that the drive band on the top of the drive is still on the drive.  I have have a couple of drives that stoped working recently and both were due to a small drive band on the top of the drive.  This band wares out and the band (looks like a small black elastic band) comes off the drive wheels.  If that is the problem you will need to replace it as just put it back on will only work for a short time before it happens again.

Also you can't usually see the problem unless you remove the drive as the band is at the top of the drive unit. Usually the symtoms are that the tape will make less noise when use insert the tape and but tape starts when you use flexbackup it just says there is not tape in the drive.

Trevor

[Trevor TDB]

Atlantis,

One other thing, usually the tape drive if it is a IDE drive ist /dev/nst0

Trevor

[Atlantis]

Hi Trevor,

I checked whether this drive belt is where it should and it is, I saw no reason to belive that there is a fault with it. And I know that the drive is /dev/nst0 and I have symlinked it to /dev/tape.

I also tried hooking it up as slave and the cdrom as master instead but this also didn't change anything.

I'm still clueless, can anybody help please?

Atlantis

[Chris Woods]

I have three sitting beside me here broken.  But to get them working initially I had to install the flexbackup panel and tweak the settings.

A quick search found my posting on this a while ago.

http://www.mail-archive.com/devinfo@lists.e-smith.org/msg10571.html

[Atlantis]

Hi Chris,

I read your message and all I can tell (unfortunately) is that I have exactly this drive and that my box is configured exactly as mentioned:

[Seagate STT20000A 20GB IDE]
- Tape block size: [ 10 ]
- erase_rewind_only: [ true ]
- erase_tape_all_level_zero: [ true ]
- file systems to backup: [ all ]
- type of backup: [ dump ]

This is how I tried to get it working all the time, I had the flexbackup panel installed from the beginning.

But what do you mean with "I have three sitting beside me here broken."? Do you think my drive is just broken and how could I find out for sure? I have always thought that it must be a software issue.

Atlantis

[Dave Dumolo]

Hello!

I've just looked at the Seagate web site because I was having a similar problem with another Seagate drive.  I too had it jumpered 'Master'.  As you'll see Seagate recommends 'Slave' jumpering.  Did that AND put in a tape of the correct density (!!) and it works OK.

Hope that helps!

DD