FC1, dd borken? Can write, but Cannot read a tape

[Gene Heskett]

Greetings;

I just changed a tape drive, for another new one just like it, because 
I was having what appeared to be either bad tapes or bad heads in the 
drive.

I have now spent the better part of 2 weeks trying to get amanda to 
settle down and run correctly with FC1, but don't seem to be able to 
hit the magic twanger from the right angle.

I've changed the drive, I've changed many of the tape for new ones, 
and still I have a read problem.

I can verify a tape is rewound with mt, use dd to write a new amanda 
label to the tape, followed by using dd to send about 150 each 32768 
sized blocks to the tape in order to flush that newly written header 
to the media, then re-wind the tape with mt, at which point I 
*should* be able to  issue: "dd if=/dev/nst0 count=1" and see the 
text in the tape header label field output to the screen.  Instead, I 
get a dd process thats hung, never touching the drive for any kind of 
a read access, no led activity whatsoever, and hung so badly that a 
reboot is required to get rid of it, and its lock on the tape drive.

Humm, since dd is *now* part of part of coreutils (and used to be in 
fileutils), I see that it was updated by yum,  to a much smaller 
utility.  To prove my point (or disprove it) I'm going to reboot for 
about the 50th time while screwing with this, and replace just 
the /bin/dd with the one from the rh8.0 distro (can't now, its 
executing (haha) and locked. 

Ok, rebooted, did the substitution, still dd does nothing but turn 
into a zombie when if=/dev/nst0.  So I'll put the dd from coreutils 
in the /var/cache/yum tree back in.

What else should I be looking at?  I'm burned out, spent a few hundred 
bucks on tape drives & tape and I'm no closer than I was 3 weeks ago 
when I updated this machine to FC1.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
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Copyright 2004 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.