Hello,
On 26.09.2005 11:45, Erik P. Olsen wrote:
...
First of all I like to understand what bacula is trying to tell me with
these messages. Secondly can a wrong tape (not a bacula volume) cause
this sort of errors and are the volumes which bacula would not accept
now unusable for bacula forever?
With a proper tape drive, it's rather hard to render a tape definitely
unusable.*
I meant unusable for restores. I am sure the tape i physically OK:
I suspect that the tapes you insert are either not labeled by bacula or
you changed your tape block size settings in between.
Maybe, but not by me.
In both cases, the easiest solution is to use the label command on them.
Yes, but then the contents are gone. I suspect that somewhere bacula has
recorded the volume as being in error and therefore will not use it. Can
that happen?
It can happen, it does happen, but then the label is still on the tape,
bacula reads it, and reports that it won't use taht tape pecause it's
marked as being in error. By the way - you can also list the tapes and
their states as recorded in the catalog.
If you are absolutely sure that they contain a bacula label, the program
btape is a good first start to find out what is wrong with the tapes,
although, in your case, he output you give above shows clearly that
bacula can't read a volume label off the tapes.
In this case, I have used dd and od with good results - something like
'dd if=/dev/nst0 count=1 bs=65536 | od -t x1c' and playing with block
sizes sometimes helped my find the block size on that tape.
I'll check that and come back with what I find. I don't know the format
of the bacula label but I assume it is the first file on the tape.
Right. Usually, it looks something like this (without "x" output from od):
dd if=/media/extdvdrecorder/DVD-0005 bs=4k count=1 | od -t c
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
0000000 O 255 330 260 \0 \0 \0 274 \0 \0 \0 \0 B B 0 2
"Magic" label is BB02
0000020 \0 \0 \0 004 C 4 372 274 377 377 377 376 \0 \0 \0 001
0000040 \0 \0 \0 230 B a c u l a 1 . 0 i
0000060 m m o r t a l \n \0 \0 \0 \0 \v \0 004 001
"Bacula 1.0 immortal" - textual tape label type and version
0000100 223 274 ( 247 5 \0 004 001 223 274 ) 305 342 \0 \0 \0
0000120 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 D V D
0000140 - 0 0 0 5 \0 \0 T e s t D V D \0 B
0000160 a c k u p \0 D V D \0 e l f \0 e l
0000200 f - s d \0 V e r . 1 . 3 7 . 3
Volume name, pool, type etc. - you recognize these, usually.
0000220 7 2 4 A u g u s t 2 0 0 5
0000240 \0 B u i l d S e p 2 2 0
0000260 0 5 1 3 : 0 1 : 1 0 \0 \n 346 341 220
0000300 \0 \0 374 \0 \0 \0 ! 227 B B 0 2 \0 \0 \0 004
0000320 C 4 372 274 \0 \0 \0 ( 377 377 377 376 \0 \0 )
0000340 h A A C 033 3 w + E 2 n Z w
0000360 O 5 / Q k h + W n 7 N d Z D / d
0000400 J y K \0 \t \0 P 034 g O I G k B
If something like that is *not* on your tape's first block, you are in
trouble... Now, I've had a case where bacula itself overwrote the tape
label with data blocks (I helped a lot, though...;-), but apart from
that time I never had a backup volume damaged by bacula.
By the way - the data blocks are similarly easy to recognize, so you can
see if you can identify bacula data on the tapes at all. If it all looks
like random data it probably is random data, i.e. what you read with a
broken drive or off an unused tape...
Keep in mind that dd | od is only what I'd call a last resort - btape is
better suited to inspect tapes, but it only gives useful results when it
can recognize the block headers, while finding them is easier for humans :-)
Arno
* Proper tape drive means "everything except DDS" :-) No worries, that
was partly a joke.
The part which is not a joke worries me nevertheless. About a year ago I
had a head crash at the same time as my tape drive decided to brake
down. In order to recover the system I had to buy a new drive to read my
backup tapes, so I am stuck with a fairly new tape drive that I wish was
of another type :(
Then you understand why I'm rather sure that, if your tapes are
unreadable, it's not baculas fault but a broken tape or tape drive...
Arno
--
IT-Service Lehmann [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Arno Lehmann http://www.its-lehmann.de
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