Re: Welcome in flooded Switzerland

[Frederick Gray <fegray@berkeley.edu>]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 02:24:52PM -0500, Peter Kammel wrote:
> Dear Fred,
> 
> Could you help me on my failed copying attempts
> to the robot. Cleaning tape next?
>

Hi, Peter,

The river level is indeed high, but I don't feel in too much danger of being
swept away.  (Also, you missed an excellent dinner party at Francoise's place
this evening...)  

I would check with the front-panel interface or the Web management
interface to see whether the drive is asking to be cleaned.  If so, then
cleaning it would be my next step.  Otherwise, I would try a couple other 
things first:

= Have you checked the write-protect switch on the tape?
= Have you tried using a different tape?
= Can you try writing a series of smaller files, perhaps just 1 KB each,
   with the dd command?  Does it fail at the same block mark, or is it
   always on the first file, or something else?

Thanks,

-- Fred

-- Fred Gray / Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher                 --
-- Department of Physics / University of California, Berkeley   --
-- fegray@berkeley.edu / phone 510-642-2438 / fax 510-642-9811  --