How to check if you have a Hardware issue with a LTO drive using Linux (4043508)

Title: How to check if you have a Hardware issue with a LTO drive using Linux
Date: January 2010
Product & Version: All
OS Version: Linux
Module & Version:
Application version:



Symptoms: NetVault shows media errors when attempting to write to a physical drive, on every tape that is loaded into the drive.

To check if the drive is faulty, please proceed as follows:

1) Shut down the NetVault Service.

2) Open a terminal and login as root

3) To check the status of the tape drive you can use the command

mt -f /dev/sto status

If you are not sure what the drive number is you can use the following command to check it :

cat /proc/scsi/scsi

This command should produce an output similar to this:

Attached devices:
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 02 Lun: 00
Vendor: PIONEER Model: DVD-ROM DVD-303 Rev: 1.10
Type: CD-ROM ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Host: scsi1 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
Vendor: IBM Model: DNES-309170W Rev: SA30
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 03


Now that you know the drive number you can adjust the command below as needed.

mt -f /dev/st0 staus

You will most likely get an output which looks like this:


SCSI 2 tape drive:
File number=0, block number=0, partition=0.
Tape block size 512 bytes. Density code 0x45 (QIC-3095-MC (TR-4)).
Soft error count since last status=0
General status bits on (41010000):
BOT ONLINE IM_REP_EN

4) Grab a fresh tape and try and write a TARBall to the tape via the command:

tar -czf /dev/st0 /testdata


The folder /testdata is used as a example you can use any other folder to be tared for this test.

Check via the command tar -tzf /dev/st0 if the tarball has been written to tape.

If there is a problem with writing the tarball to the tape drive then you might see the following error:


tar: /dev/st0: Cannot write: Input/output error tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now


If you are not able to write a tarball to the tape then you will need to contact your hardware vendor.

Depending upon the version of the OS, usage of commands may very or require different device types such as sg instead of st devices.

SFDC solution number:
English version available ID 00005436
Version française disponible ID
Deutsche Version verfügbar ID