HP Storageworks 448 tape drive input/output error with Ubuntu

Question

I'm trying to set a backup to tape of a machine using flexbackup. However any attempt to write to the tape drive (via either flexbackup or just tar) results in "/dev/st0: Input/output error"

The machine seems to recognise the drive (HP Storageworks Ultrium 448) and that there's a tape in it and "mt status" seems to work... "mt -f /dev/st0 rewind" or "erase" throw no errors...

root@stor001:/# mt status
SCSI 2 tape drive:
File number=0, block number=0, partition=0.
Tape block size 0 bytes. Density code 0x42 (LTO-2).
Soft error count since last status=0
General status bits on (41010000):
 BOT ONLINE IM_REP_EN

root@stor001:/# cat /proc/scsi/scsi
Attached devices:
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
  Vendor: HL-DT-ST Model: DVDRAM GSA-4084N Rev: KS02
  Type:   CD-ROM                           ANSI  SCSI revision: 05
Host: scsi2 Channel: 00 Id: 03 Lun: 00
  Vendor: HP       Model: Ultrium 2-SCSI   Rev: S65D
  Type:   Sequential-Access                ANSI  SCSI revision: 03

"tell" does however

root@stor001:/# mt -f /dev/st0 tell
/dev/st0: Input/output error

Based on a forum post I found, I tried:

root@stor001:/# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/nst0 bs=1024 count=10
10+0 records in
10+0 records out
10240 bytes (10 kB) copied, 5.0815 s, 2.0 kB/s

which gave the person on the forum an error but seems to work for me.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'm all ears...

Answer 1

1) first are you sure to use the correct version of mt ?

# mt --version

should return "mt-st" name of binary.

If you only get "mt", then download the mt-st package.

# apt-get install mt-st

2) "tell" is only available since SCSI-2, so try this once after each load of tape.

# mt -f /dev/nst0 stsetoptions scsi2logical

then try again the "tell"

3) just a remark : use "/dev/nst0" instead of "/dev/st0", or the drive is rewinded after each operation...