I have an LTO-1 drive that I have been making backups on for about 3 years. I was trying to read in some older tapes today and something funny is going on. (2.6.14-4 vanilla kernel). If a take a recently written tape and do a simple dd I get a nice stream of non-repeating data. If I take an older tape I get the same data repeating over and over. I tried 4 tapes, 2 of which were tar backups made on this machine and are labeled 256KB blocks. The other 2 are NTbackup backups made on different hardware/OS. I don't know what blocksize NTbackup uses. At first I thought it was the data on the media, but now I'm not so sure. When I change the dd blocksize I change the amount of data being repeated. It appears the first block of data from a dd perspective is just repeated forever. ie. dd bs=10k gives 1 10k block repeated over and over dd bs=32k gives 1 32k block repeated over and over dd bs=256k gives 1 256k block repeated over and over dd bs=512k gives 1 512k block repeated over and over OTOH only the first few kb of the above blocks look valid anyway. The rest of the repeating block appears to be full of nulls so I'm not really getting more data by extending the block size. Does anyone have any idea what is going on? Could this be a kernel issue? I hope so because I don't want to lose all those old tapes. Greg -- Greg Freemyer The Norcross Group Forensics for the 21st Century -- Greg Freemyer The Norcross Group Forensics for the 21st Century - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
