ITEM: E7787L

Cannot read from a 3480 tape drive

Question:

I have an RISC System/6000 Model 340 running AIX 3.2.4.  I have a
Cipher 3480 tape drive attached to the system.  It is configured
as a 150MB 1/4 inch tape drive.  It shows up as available when I do  
"lsdev -Cc  tape" and addresses are not conflicting.  I tried to write
to it with a SMIT backup.  But it returned:

backup medium error  ioerror: write:  invalid argument

I also tried to configure it as an OST (Other SCSI Tape) device but 
it failed with a "will not match device" error.


Response:

Since the device was recognized by the system as an IBM 150MB 1/4"
tape drive it will default to 512 block size with density settings
of 16 and 15.  The 3480 is not a 1/4" tape drive and it likely
does not support these density settings.  The error message that the
backup command is returning generally indicates an incorrect block
size or density.  Try setting Density \#1 and Density \#2 to 0 which
will use the factory default density setting.

Response:

Thanks for the information.

We have this particular model of tape drive working successfully on 
other AIX 3.2.4 systems so we took a look at their values on the other 
systems.  They were set to 0 (variable) block size and 0 (factory 
default) density for both Density \#1 and Density \#2.  

We made these changes to the failing tape drive and the backup command 
was successful.



Support Line: Cannot read from a 3480 tape drive ITEM: E7787L

Dated: November 1993 Category: N/A

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