My Tape Drive Hates Me

[Jerry LeVan]

Hello A/UXers,
I sure am having trouble backing up my X11 source disk.

My source disk is a 80 meg apple disk with a single unix
partition ( no mac partition). It is a sysv 5.2 partition.
There is about 70 meg of source and code in the partition
so one tape ( I have the apple 40 meg tape drive) will not
suffice for a backup.

Attempt to do a tar backup results in a write error on the first
write to the second tape ( the output of tar is piped to the tcb
command and thence to the tape device.) I have swapped tapes, cleaned
heads and a run around in circles but I still get a failure as
soon as the second tape is written to. ( Same problem if I attempt
to back up "/").

Cpio evidently does not know about multiple tapes and croaks at
the end of the first tape.

Ok, on to dump.bsd -- heres what basically happens
#/etc/dump.bsd -T5.2 0cf /dev/rmt/tc1 /dev/dsk/c5d0s0
...
DUMP:estimated 67070 tape blocks on 0.87 tape(s).
...
  DUMP:51.09% done,finished in 0:29
  DUMP:tape write error 38848 blocks into tape 1
  DUMP:     tsize=76800, tenths=8, asize=38848
  DUMP:NEEDS ATTENTION:Do you want to restart?: ("yes" or"no")

Three different tapes yielded an identical failure.
Well OK, maybe the "c" option is not setting the parameters
correctly note that it appears to think that only 0.87 tapes will
be used.

I tried the following command to explicitly set the size and
block size.

/etc/dump.bsd -T5.2 0bsf 8k 4800b /dev/rmt/tc1 /dev/dsk/c5d0s0

The above command yielded an identical dialog and failure as
the first command.

ANY help would be appreciated...
(In fact I would like to know if anybody has had any luck
 with the apple tape drive.)
**********************************************************************
I am starting the sixth week of waiting for apple to replace my defective
A/UX 2.0 media (A kind soul at the regional apple office loaded A/UX 2.0
on my disk so I could get "on the air"). Apple keeps sending the stuff back
to my salesman for reasons which sound remarkably like "You were not hopping
on your left foot and spinning in a circle as you mailed the package".

Does Scully accept charges for obscene phone calls?

Jerry
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| Jerry LeVan                           | Phone:(606)-622-1931              |
| Department of Computer Science        |                                   |
| Eastern Kentucky University           | Email:matlevan at eku.bitnet         |
| Richmond Ky 40475                     |                                   |
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|      "The series converges so slowly that it actually diverges."          |
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