Perhaps it's a device block-size mismatch. Try using `mt` and set your blocksize to 0. Your restores will run slower, but you might be able to read the tapes... (?)

grdodson@lexmark.com wrote:

Anyone having problems restoring their dump tapes? We pulled a couple of old archive tapes (6 mo. old level 0 dumps) to restore some files and were unable to read them. Kept getting buffer size or buffer allocation errors. Placed a call to Tech. Sup. waiting for a callback (and waiting, and waiting, and waiting...).

While waiting we tried some experiments. The tapes were written on an F330 running 4.x NFS & CIFS enabled (so we cannot use a sun to restore them).

We discovered that we could read recent tapes written by either an F630 or F330 on a F630 running 5.1.2P1 with NFS & CIFS.

I strongly suspect that a filer running 5.1.2P1 cannot read tapes written with 4.x. This has a less than pleasant affect on our backup & archive strat egy.

Can anyone confirm this?

 Thanks.

Graydon Dodson grdodson@lexmark.com Lexmark International Inc.