Is it possible for a malfunctioning tape drive to permanently harm a tape?

From: Barry L. Bond (barry_at_barrycon.cfl.rr.com)
Date: 06/25/05 

Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 17:24:22 GMT

Greetings!

     Here is my question: is it possible for a malfunctioning (travan)
tape drive to cause even a new tape to have a write error afterward?

     Now, some background! :-)

     I have a Linux computer, a 450 MHz, Pentium II system purchased in
mid-1999. It had a travan, TR4, tape drive. I had numerous problems with
it, the first three years. (I wound up sending it back, under warranty, a
couple of times.) In 2002, I purchased a new travan tape drive. It is
TR5 instead of TR4, so this led to the purchase of new travan tapes.

     This last drive has been pretty good. I don't believe I had many
problems with it, until the last six months to a year.

     I started having backups that didn't finish, for one reason or
another. I would purchase brand new travan tapes, and about 30 to 40% of
them would work, and slightly over half didn't even work, on the first
try. I took many Imation tapes back to Office Depot.

     About a month ago now, I purchased three more travan tapes from
Certance, which seems to be the company that handles Seagate's tape
business now. I got three new travan tapes. The first one worked. The
second and third one didn't. (Most of the errors are write errors.)

     I purchased a travan cleaning cartridge, which arrived the middle of
this past week. I cleaned the tape drive head. Still, now, the second
and third brand new Certance tapes which arrived only a couple of weeks or
so ago, are apparently not usable.

     With this many tape problems, I find myself looking for another
possible explanation. At first, I thought that Imation must have had a
bad batch of tapes, because only two or three of the six or seven I
purchased worked. Now, three new tapes, different brand, from Seagate (or
the company who handles their tape business now), still one worked, two
didn't.

     If I didn't have any backups to work, I would look into hardware.
But, a backup will work every once in a while. And, I verify it, reading
through it again. Not an error. Although not frequently, I have restored
some files from a backup before. It worked fine.

     But, it's like, once a tape has an error, that tape is not usable
again. And, I have tried up to five times to write on a tape which had an
error, and it always fails, at about the same point in the backup,
afterward.

     At first, I just returned the tapes to Office Depot, and they
replaced them (on two or three different trips). But, it got to the point
where even the once again new tape, just unwrapped, failed.

     I have to consider, is there possibly a hardware problem with my tape
drive? I do not understand it 100%, but I could see how a malfunctioning
tape drive could "garble" data being written to the tape, such that that
tape is not readable. But, I would think, in this case, just rewriting
over the tape would have the tape still usable. These are write errors,
and they always fail at the same point in future backup attempts.

     At the moment, I have ONE tape which has worked. (The first of the
three recently purchased ones from Certance.) I am afraid to try to use
it, because if it errors, based on my observations and history, it won't
be usable any more, either.

     I am about to upgrade to a newer version of Linux, and get two new,
larger, hard disks. What I'm planning on doing is shut down the current,
older, Linux, and go into the cabinet, and remove the two smaller hard
disks and replace them with larger hard disks I'm about to purchase.
Then, on these new hard disks, install the newer version of Linux. (I
then need to have many very important data files on a good, reliable,
backup, so I can restore the data files, with all new operating system
files already in place.)

     I would only feel comfortable doing this after I have at least TWO,
known, good, reliable backups, from which I can get my data files. (Once
I get them on the new Linux system, and back them up then [and I'll be
using a different backup scheme, also as of the new Linux system], I'll
have them on the hard disks, and on backups of the new system, and I'll
feel more comfortable that I have them enough different places to restore
them, should something happen.) But, at the rate I'm going, getting at
least two known good backups is becoming increasingly difficult, as well
as expensive! :-O

     So, there is some background information. Thank you for sticking
with me and reading this far, if you're still reading! :-D

     If anyone has any revealing information, suggestions,
recommendations, etc., I'd be quite pleased to hear (or read) them! :-)

     Thank you!

     Barry 

-- 
Barry L. Bond                     | http://home.cfl.rr.com/os9barry/
Software Engineer, ITT Industries | (My personal home web page, last
                                  | updated February 17, 2005)
bbond@cfl.rr.com <- personal      |

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