From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Ishikawa Subject: Re: Ungraceful handling of scsi tape drive error condition Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2002 11:52:56 +0900 Sender: linux-scsi-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <3D40B988.6D24ACF@yk.rim.or.jp> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-2022-jp Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Received: from yk.rim.or.jp (really [127.0.0.1]) by yk.rim.or.jp via smail with esmtp id (Debian Smail3.2.0.114) for ; Fri, 26 Jul 2002 11:53:00 +0900 (JST) List-Id: linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org To: linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org, Kai.Makisara@metla.fi, dc390@garloff.de, garloff@suse Hi, My own followup: After a few e-mail exchanges with Kai Makisara, - I tried cleaning tape, - swapped SCSI card, etc.. I still saw strange errors. The drive seemed to emit UNIT_ATTENTION at unexpected times and the driver thought the tape was gone and stopped writing. Then I found out that the power supply of the external SCSI enclosure that houses the DDS2 tape drive has become unreliable. Once I put the drive into another enclosure (with presumably a good power supply), I could archive files successfully. Obviously, the drive behaved erratically due to the dying power supply( the power was there, but presumably the voltage was fluctuating. ), and even the best intention of the drivers could not cope with such dire situation. The transient nature of the bad power supply made it difficult to catch the real cause of the problem initially. (SCSI cable and terminator were suspected but they are good after all.) Honestly speaking this is the first time a power supply of an external SCSI enclosure went bad for me (I have used SCSI devices more than 15 years) and so somehow I suspected power-supply very little initially. So maybe we should ask if power-supply is flakey when we see SCSI errors on top of the usual suspects (cable, terminator, etc..). Thank you all for helpful tips. Chiaki