Re: Colorado Jumbo 250

>I have more syslog info from running erase, but it's quite long. I'll send
>it only if it's necessary.

That would be the most interesting information.  Ftape is highly sensitive
to the tape format, so to rule out problems with the tape format, you need
to use a command that doesn't expect the tape already to be formatted.
You didn't mention whether there is any indication of success or failure on
erase.

'status' involves some nonstandard drive features, so while it may seem
like the simplest possible command, an I/O error from it really isn't
unusual.

If the erase output is long because it's full of error messages, you can
cut off everything after
the first, because there shouldn't be even one error.

You don't appear to have full logging turned on.  I don't remember exactly
how you do that, but there's a module parameter and also a ftmt command.
In spite of the Unix culture's distaste for giving error information, ftape
with full logging turned on does a pretty good job of telling you via
syslog why it considers something failed.

When you're trying to isolate a problem, 'tar' is a fairly complex test
case.  Start with 'dd' instead, and try to read or write one block.  Hint:
you have to choose the correct block size.  If you don't, ftape will report
an I/O error.  I don't know how to find out the right block size, but it is
usually 10K.



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