I have a D3 7.2 system on top of AIX 5.2. An IBM 7206-005 tape drive
(4mm) was installed, due to our other tape drive dying. The drive
installed on AIX automatically with a Block Size of 1024 and is
functional under AIX (a mksysb worked fine). I have tried it with a
block size of 0 or 512, with D3 setup as either a 4mm (/dev/rmt1.1
16384 d l) or as a SCT (/dev/rmt0.1 16384 q l) with label as 80 or
512. SCT setting with AIX 512 appears to work, but is causing data
loss. Not sure what to try next. Any ideas would be greatly
appreciated.

Thanks,
Jeff

prioritymgmt (AT) gmail (DOT) com wrote:
We have an aix similar to yours, with a Sony external 4mm 12G tape
drive. I had to go down to the basement and turn it back on, we left it
connected to the network for reference, but off. The smit screen for
the 4mm drive looks like this:


Change / Show Characteristics of a Tape Drive

Type or select values in entry fields.
Press Enter AFTER making all desired changes.

[Entry Fields]
Tape Drive rmt2
Tape Drive type ost
Tape Drive interface scsi
Description Other SCSI Tape Drive
Status Available
Location 00-04-01-2,0
Parent adapter vscsi1
Connection address 2,0
BLOCK size (0=variable length) [0]
+# Use DEVICE BUFFERS during writes
yes +
Use EXTENDED file marks yes
+
RESERVE/RELEASE support no
+
BLOCK SIZE for variable length support [0]
+# DENSITY setting #1
[0] +# DENSITY setting #2
[0] +# Set
delay after a FAILED command [45]
+# Set timeout for the READ or WRITE command
[144] +


The corresponding line in the pick0 record was:

tape /dev/rmt2.1 16384 d ll # tape 5


Hope something in there helps! (Time to go put an old soldier back to bed!)

Art

<prioritymgmt (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote

Jeff - Running D3 7.2 on top of Linux, we run this script at bootup:

#!/bin/bash
mt -f /dev/nst0 defblksize 0
mt -f /dev/nst0 setblk 0
mt -f /dev/nst0 rewind

And set the permissions for /dev/nst0 to 777