Q. Does the Sun Ulta 450 's tape drive an HP DDS3 support high density ?

by j » Wed, 05 Feb 2003 15:53:40

Hello,

Does the HP DDS-3 tape drive that comes with a Sun Ultra 450 support
reading & writing to high density tapes - if so, any information on
how I would go about configuring it to do so would be greatly
appreciated.

Machine: Sun Ultra 450
OS: SunOS yebisu 5.6 Generic_105181-21 sun4u sparc
SUNW,Ultra-4
Tape: HP DDS-3 4MM DAT tape drive:

Thanks in advance.

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1. Tape drives and 'dd' on Ultra 450

I'm having a problem with DAT tape drives (a Sony SDT-S9000 and an HP
C1533A) and 'dd' on an Ultra 450 (Solaris 2.6). 'dd' seems to be
truncating partial records when pulling files off of a tape.

Here's a file:
-rwxrwxr-x 1 davids sysadmin 218435 Nov 16 1996 xa2ps*

Copy it to tape, using 'dd' with the default block size:
openfly 104% dd if=xa2ps of=/dev/rmt/0n
426+1 records in
426+1 records out

Rewind the tape and try to pull it off:
openfly 105% mt -f /dev/rmt/0n rewind
openfly 106% dd if=/dev/rmt/0n of=tmp0
426+0 records in
426+0 records out
Note that the partial record seems to have been truncated:
openfly 107% diff xa2ps tmp0
Binary files xa2ps and tmp0 differ

Try to pull the file off with a larger block size:
openfly 108% mt -f /dev/rmt/0n rewind
openfly 109% dd if=/dev/rmt/0n of=tmp0 bs=1024
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
No luck.

Try a smaller block size:
openfly 110% mt -f /dev/rmt/0n rewind
openfly 111% dd if=/dev/rmt/0n of=tmp0 bs=5
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
Nope.

I've tried adding entries to the 'st.conf' file for the Sony SDT-S9000
tape drive and re-booting (even 'boot -r') - no change in the above
behavior. In fact, the system seems not to have picked up the changes
in 'st.conf': 'mt -f /dev/rmt/0n' status still reports the tape drive is
"SONY 4mm DAT tape drive" even though I put in parameters for a "SONY
DDS-3 4mm DAT" in 'st.conf'.

And the kicker is, both tape drives in question work perfectly fine on
an Ultra 2 (2.6) with an unmodified 'st.conf' file.

Ideas, anyone?

David Simas

... flybane.berkeley.edu

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