Re: Media Surface Errors

Make sure you clean the heads on these tape drives often. My experience with RS/6000 tape drives (limited to 8mm drives) is that they seem to go bad in LARGE numbers. We went through 8-10 tape drives over a 6 month period. Thank goodness for maintenance contracts. Original Message:: >> RISC6000/Informix'ers, We are having a problem installing Informix, and at this point we are woundering if someone else has had similar problems. We have an IBM RISC6000 with a 4mm tape drive. We sucessfully installed I-SQL. We got "TAR: TAPE READ ERROR: MEDIA SURFACE ERROR" on the ESQL/C tape and the 4GL RDS tape. We verified, but did not install the SE tape, and it appears fine. I contacted Infromix, and they sent out two replacement tapes. I just tried to install these, and I get the same error. Our tape blocking factor is 0. if you need more specifics, E-Mail me and I will reply. We are a mainframe CA/IDMS shop migrating (slowly) to the RISC platform and Informix databse. Our experience with the platform and database is very limited. If you have any ideas please help us out. <<