Tape tar error

Question

Hi,
I am trying to determine if a tape is full because on 2 different tapes (on 2 different SunOS servers), im receiving 2 different kind of errors:
What i want to verify is if both tapes are actually full, as i got different tar errors with the same status "sense key(0x13)= EOT".
# uname -a
SunOS SUN250 5.10 Generic_118833-33 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-60
# /bin/tar cvf /dev/rmt/0n /export/home
a /export/home/jerry/wlserver_10.0.tar.gz 28528 tape blocks
tar: write error: unexpected EOF
# mt -f /dev/rmt/0n status
HP DDS-4 DAT (Sun) tape drive:
sense key(0x13)= EOT residual= 0 retries= 0
file no= 8 block no= 0
provadm@01:home/provadm%uname -a
SunOS 01 5.10 Generic_120011-14 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-V245
provadm@01:provadm/tmp%tar cvf /dev/rmt/0n add.sh
a add.sh 1 tape blocks
tar: close error: I/O error
Oct 11 13:31:19 01 scsi: [ID 107833 kern.warning] WARNING: /pci@1f,700000/pci@0/scsi@2/st@0,0 (st0):
Oct 11 13:31:19 01 Error for Command: write file mark Error Level: Fatal
Oct 11 13:31:19 01 scsi: [ID 107833 kern.notice] Requested Block: 1 Error Block: 1
Oct 11 13:31:19 01 scsi: [ID 107833 kern.notice] Vendor: HP Serial Number: 9 $DR-1
Oct 11 13:31:19 01 scsi: [ID 107833 kern.notice] Sense Key: Volume Overflow
Oct 11 13:31:19 01 scsi: [ID 107833 kern.notice] ASC: 0x0 (end of partition/medium detected), ASCQ: 0x2, FRU: 0x0
Oct 11 13:31:19 01 scsi: [ID 107833 kern.notice] End-of-Media Detected
provadm@01:provadm/tmp%mt -f /dev/rmt/0n status
HP DAT-72 tape drive:
sense key(0x13)= EOT residual= 0 retries= 0
file no= 3778 block no= 1
provadm@01:provadm/tmp%
Many Thanks!!
Edited by: 964913 on Oct 12, 2012 2:19 AM

Answer 1

Was it written to with tar?
I may be more inclined to use a dd command (piping output through strings in case of 'binary gibberish') ...
dd if=dev/rmt/1 ibs=8192 files=1 | strings
By the way, I see you are refering to /dev/rmt/0m ... more used to HP-UX by any chance? A better device name to use for compression in Solaris would be /dev/rmt/1c