Thanks to many people for their helpful replies, including one to 'if all
else fails throw it off Grouse Mountain' (a local mountain), but that was
not necessary in the end.
It was an internal drive and there is no pin hole to mechanically eject
the tape. Rebooting the system, without powering down, hadn't worked.
In the end, powering down the system and then holding the eject button in
for 20 seconds during the power up and the system finally gave back the tape.
I also put in a call for h/w support and they will be replacing the DAT
drive later today. There is a known problem with the firmware of TLZ07
drives that are over a certain age (1-2 years, i think).
The offending tape was 'retired' (it hadn't been in circulation all that
long). A test of the drive after it finally spit out the tape, worked fine
and we were able to use the drive to load a few tapes of a software
upgrade scheduled for the next day.
One of the more informative replies for dealing with stuck tapes was
from: "Macdonell, Dennis" <DennisMacdonell_at_auslig.gov.au>
**** Dennis's reply *************
Sorry, I should have spelt it out a bit more than I did. Basically the
processes that have been carried out to retrieve stubborn tapes are
(1) pressing the eject button for an extended length of time
(2) powering off and then powering on with the eject button depressed
(3) removing the tape from the plastic enclosure and connecting it to a
pc power supply and powering up the pc with the eject button depressed
(4) using the scu utility to see if the tape unit will expel the tape
**************************
I did try the scu utility remotely and was able to change the status of
the tape unit but the tape still would not eject.
Thanks again for the many replies,
Gerry
********* original question ****************
Help for stupid problem.
We have a TLZ07 DAT drive in alpha 2000. I went to put in this evenings
backup tape when I noticed it hadn't popped out from last night's backup.
I use 'mt rewoffl' at the end of our backup script. The cron mail message
was fine in that all the filesystems backed up successfully but there
was an error on the 'rewoffl' which i missed when i checked the message
this morning.
'mt status' tells me that:
stat 5
DEV_BOM DEV_OFFLINE
'mt online' gives me:
/dev/nrmt0h online 1 failed: Invalid argument
'mt rewind' gives me:
Error on device named /dev/nrmt0h - Place TLZ07 tape drive unit #40 ONLINE
I've tried the eject button and nothing happens.
The lights on the front don't help as the left hand one has not worked
for a few weeks.
Is there some other way of ejecting the tape?
Thanks,
Gerry
Gerry MacKinnon | email: gmackinn_at_capcollege.bc.ca
Computer Support Services | voice: (604) 983-7548
Capilano College | fax : (604) 984-1795
North Vancouver, B.C. |
Received on Tue May 20 1997 - 22:30:08 NZST