Sorry this summary was so long in coming back to you.
Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions about solving this problem.
The general consensus was that it is a problem with the reporting of
messages from the tape drive to Solaris.
Make sure that your tape heads are cleaned often, you are using high
quality data certified DAT tapes not audio certified tapes and you
should be okay.
I still get the error occasionally but I have confirmed my backups by
restoring the tapes to another machine and retrieving all the data
successfully.
Regards
Andrew G. Gittens
Systems Manager
Vision Systems Software
P.O.Box 804, James Fort Building,
Hincks Street, Bridgetown
Barbados.
Original Question :-
>Hi Sun Managers,
> This is a pretty simple question. I have a Sun 4mm 4-8Gb Tape
Drive
>which was working fine until recently. I can read tapes from the drive
>with no problem. But when I try to write to a tape I get the following
>error:-
>
> WARNING:
>/iommu@0,10000000/sbus@0,10001000/espdma@5,8400000/esp@5,8800000/st@4,0
>(st4):
> Soft error rate (retries = 20) during writing was too high
> Periodic head cleaning required and/or replace tape cartridge
>
>
>I have had the drive serviced by the local Sun Dealer, but the error
>still persists. Is it possible that the drive is fine and the tapes I
am
>using are faulty? Is there anyway of checking the tapes?
>Any suggestions would be appreciated.
>
>
>Regards
>
>Andrew G. Gittens
>Systems Manager
>Vision Systems Software
>P.O.Box 804, James Fort Building,
>Hincks Street, Bridgetown
>Barbados.
>