Re: SCSI Tape corruption - update

Geert Uytterhoeven
2001-07-27T07:53:42Z

On Fri, 20 Jul 2001, Gérard Roudier wrote:
> On Fri, 20 Jul 2001, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
> > The problem is indeed introduced by the changes to the Sym53c8xx in 2.2.18-pre1.
> > I managed to find some intermediate versions in the 2.3.x series, and here are the
> > results:
> > - sym53c8xx-1.3g (from BK linuxppc_2_2): OK
> > - sym53c8xx-1.5e: crash in SCSI interrupt during driver init
> > - sym53c8xx-1.5f: lock up during driver init
> > - sym53c8xx-1.5g: random 32-byte error bursts when writing to tape
>
> That's an interesting result. But 1.5g - 1.3g diffs are probably very
> large. Patches available from ftp.tux.org should allow to resurrect
> driver versions 1.4, 1.5, 1.5a, 1.5b, 1.5c, 1.5d.
>
> ftp://ftp.tux.org/pub/roudier/drivers/linux/sym53c8xx/README
>
> You may, for example, apply incremental patches that address kernel 2.2.5
> to a fresh kernel 2.2.5 tree and extract driver files accordingly.

Thanks!

With some small modifications, I made 1.5a to work fine. No error burst. So the
problem is introduced between 1.5a and 1.5g.

Unfortunately my DDS-1 drive seems to have died for real after this test :-(
I don't know yet whether I will replace it with a new tape drive or with a
CD-RW. Which means I may never find out which change caused the problem...

I assume other people suffer from the same error burst problem, but they never
notice until they really want to restore data. Me myself only notived it by
accident, too.

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