I've been using a HP DDS-2 tapestreamer to make backups with Mondo Rescue
for quite some time. It has always worked like a charm.
A few months ago, I bought a second hand DDS-4 streamer, also from
Hewlett-Packard. It's a:
$ cat /proc/scsi/scsi
Attached devices:
[cut]
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 06 Lun: 00
Vendor: HP Model: C5683A Rev: C005
Type: Sequential-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
From that moment on, I've had quite a lot of troubles with Mondo. Making
backups still worked fine, but restoring from tape or just trying to verify
the contents of the tape didn't work. And making backups while you know that
you won't be able to restore them is pretty useless.
Some of the symptoms: I was unable to use the tape as an extended data-disk.
After booting from the first floppy, Mondo tried to access the tape, but
aborted with:
tar: Error opening '/dev/st0': I/O error
But even when I booted from CD-ROM or all 4 floppies, I had lot's of
troubles trying to read from the tapestreamer.
Because of my ignorance, I blamed it on Mondo.
Some time later, I stumbled across the support pages on the HP website
and noticed that a new firmware revision was available (C111). My tapestreamer
had C005, which is probably very old.
(At the time of writing, the firmware can be downloaded here.
If the link no longer works, please send me an
email.)
After upgrading the firmware, all seems fine again. Both using the tape
as an extended data disk and verifying or restoring from tape now
works. As far as I can tell, the old firmware had some bug in it,
causing some block size related problems.
BTW: I had to use Windows98 to do the upgrade , because I was unable to figure
out how to do it under Dos or Linux.
Some software called "HP Storage Works Library and Tape Tools" is available
from the HP website (for Windows).
I hope this is of some help to anybody who is suffering from the same or similar problems.
BTW: did I already mention that Mondo is great? Thanks to Hugo and all the
other for developing Mondo Rescue!
For more information about it, please refer to the Official Website.
Maurice Janssen
2003-03-18
Update (2003-12-27)
There seems to be a new firmware (C305) at this location.
I also received an email that there should be a C908 revision,
but I haven't been able to locate it.
If anyone knows where I can find it, please let me know. Thanks.
Update (2004-03-05)
I got an email (thanks Matt!) with a link to the C908 firmware revision.
However, this revision appears to be an old one from 1999, while the
C305 revision is dated May 2003.