Solaris 10 tape read error

[rasczak]

I am hoping someone here has seen this before and can lend me their insight, it's a baffling problem for me as I am still learning the nuances of Solaris. On a Solaris 10 system, I created a tar [tar cvf] to tape of a large (9gb) zipped windows file (copied the file over via nfs share). My issue is when I bring the tape over to a newer Solaris box, I do a tar tvf just to list the contents and receive an error

tar: tape read error.

I bring this tape back to the old system and it reads the tape just fine. I have used other tapes in the new system just fine, but when I go from this old sol10 box to new sol10 it seems to fail.

 

[Nothinman]

Are the tape drives the same model? Is hardware compression set the same on both?

 

[rasczak]

Are the tape drives the same model? Is hardware compression set the same on both?

No, one is a Seagate dat72 (newer) and the other is an HP dat72. I'm not sure what you mean by hardware compression.

 

[Nothinman]

No, one is a Seagate dat72 (newer) and the other is an HP dat72. I'm not sure what you mean by hardware compression.

Most tape drives have a setting for enabling/disabling hardware compression of the data stored on tape, I wouldn't assume that is interchangeable between drive models let alone vendors. On Linux I would use the mt command to turn that off, not sure about Solaris though.

http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Hardware_compression

 

[rasczak]

using dd. I'll give you a status in the morning.

I have a feeling I may have a bad scsi card. We'll see.

 

[Nothinman]

What about dd? I thought you said you were using tar to read/write the tape?

 

[rasczak]

What about dd? I thought you said you were using tar to read/write the tape?

Since tar wasn't working properly for me, I used dd instead to write my files to tape. I'm under a bit of a time crunch and I have no other alternatives at this point.

 

[Nothinman]

Since tar wasn't working properly for me, I used dd instead to write my files to tape. I'm under a bit of a time crunch and I have no other alternatives at this point.

Ah, so dd worked but tar didn't? Sounds like an incompatibility between those two versions of tar (64-bit vs 32-bit?) then.