(previous DDS horror stories snipped...)

We just had an "interesting" one... had a DDS drive which had no
indications of a problem' - it was used in backups and passed VSTORE
without a hitch.  However, when we tried to restore a database on the
development system that was created on that drive, it failed.
Subsequent backup sets failed.  Multiple drives failed to read the
tape.  Doing a DSLINE/:FILE foo;dev=other#tape and restore *foo
worked fine.  Tapes written on other drives wouldn't even AVR (the
process that does the "Volume (unlabelled) mounted on ldev #x) failed
on tapes written on other drives.

The drive had creeped out of alignment, but thte only indication was
trying to read it's tapes on another drive.  We had the drive replaced
today, but bear in mind that by "repairing" such drives means that you
can no longer "read" tapes recently written on that drive, so beware.

Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>