Re: SCSI Tape corruption - update

Geert Uytterhoeven
2001-05-08T07:14:17Z

On Mon, 7 May 2001, Lorenzo Marcantonio wrote:
> On Mon, 7 May 2001, Rob Turk wrote:
> > Have you ruled out hardware failures? There's been a few isolated reports
>
> That tape drive (Sony SDT-9000, less than 2 years of service) works
> perfectly on Windows NT (were it was before) and even on Linux 2.2
>
> Also the cartridge was brand new.

In the mean time I down/upgraded to 2.2.17 on my PPC box (CHRP LongTrail,
Sym53c875, HP C5136A DDS1) and I can confirm that the problem does not happen
under 2.2.17 neither.

My experiences:
- reading works fine, writing doesn't
- 2.2.x works fine, 2.4.x doesn't (at least since 2.4.0-test1-ac10)
- hardware compression doesn't matter
- I have a sym53c875, Lorenzo has an Adaptec, so most likely it's not a
SCSI hardware driver bug
- I have a PPC, Lorenzo doesn't, so it's not CPU-specific
- corruption is always a block of 32 bytes being replaced by 32 bytes from
the previous tape block (depending on block size!) (approx. 6 errors per
256 MB)

Lorenzo, can you please investigate the exact nature of the corruption on your
system?
- How many successive bytes are corrupted?
- Where do the corrupted data come from?

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
-- Linus Torvalds