Noob with LTO-5: mount point failed as “specified but not accessible” or “no such file or directory”

[Tim Jones]

Isn’t manual LTFS handling fun 😉 ?

A couple of things that I see –

• On the Mac, your mount point should be /Volumes, not /mnt or your desktop.

• You must use sudo to manually create the mount point.

• You must use sudo to mount with the ltfs command.

• You will need to match settings for the tape to be properly handled by your copy of the LTFS tools, so you will need to know how the original tape was formatted (blocksize, sync type, etc).

There are other tools out there that will allow you to make better use of your LTO-5 drive (performance and ease of access) than trying to hack your way through the manual LTFS tools. Our BRU Producer’s Edition is one of those tools.

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Marshall Wetta]

Thanks a lot for your help, Tim. Oh yes, LTFS handling has been a world of fun :s.

Your advice was helpful, but I’m afraid I couldn’t mount the LTO device using your suggestions. I am new to terminal and my boss prefers to use it manually rather than using a GUI program to manage the media, but I am sure that BRU works wonders. The other systems we have connected the LTO device with have all been working smoothly so I would also prefer to solve this problem the manual way in order to better understand my machine. Once mounted on the other systems, we basically drag and drop .dmg’s of all of our raw media onto the backup tapes and haven’t had a problem until mounting this new machine.

RE: “On the Mac, your mount point should be /Volumes, not /mnt or your desktop.” I cannot find the folder named Volumes on my Mac. The other systems we have use a folder on the desktop that becomes a volume into which we save our raw media. Do you have any good alternative?

RE: “You must use sudo to manually create the mount point.” When I tried to use the sudo command, I was prompted to put in my password. Then I was unable to enter any text into the Password line in terminal.

“Admins-iMac:~ mediamanage$ export PATH=”$PATH:/usr/local/bin”
Admins-iMac:~ mediamanage$ sudo ltfs /mnt/Users/mediamanage/Desktop/lto5

WARNING: Improper use of the sudo command could lead to data loss
or the deletion of important system files. Please double-check your
typing when using sudo. Type “man sudo” for more information.

To proceed, enter your password, or type Ctrl-C to abort.

Password:
Sorry, try again.
Password:
Sorry, try again.
Password:
Sorry, try again.
sudo: 3 incorrect password attempts ”

I’m using a separate user than the Admin user on this machine, but I have admin privileges and no password to my user. I feel like at every step I am doing something wrong because of my lack of understanding of this programming language…. 🙁

RE: “You must use sudo to mount with the ltfs command.” On the other machines we use the LTO with, we’ve never before had to use the sudo command to mount new tapes. ?

I’m sorry to shoot down all of your advice, Tim, but I am at the point where just thinking about this issue frustrates me. Could you maybe, please, write out the command for mounting the device if I am not entering it correctly?

Thanks for all your help!

[Tim Jones]

Unfortunately, Marshall, you will need to familiarize yourself with the basics of Terminal operations to get all of this to work consistently.

1: You should NEVER have an admin account with no password (on any system). This is why your sudo call fails. Assign a password to that account and it will work as described.

2: /Volumes is not visible in Finder, you’ll only see it in the Terminal unless you work some serious magic.

To See the /Volumes folder:
ls -l /Volumes
To create the mount point folder (replace ltfsvol with whatever folder name you prefer):
sudo mkdir /Volumes/ltfsvol
To properly mount the ltfs tape:
sudo /usr/local/bin/ltfs -o devname=0 /Volumes/ltfsvol

3: The other problems are caused by the fact that the mount point must exist before ltfs can mount a volume at the location.

Regardless of what your boss has achieved on Windows or Linux, OS X does not work the same way. Apple has a different filesystem layout and if you step outside of their defined paths, you’ll not get what you expect.

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Marshall Wetta]

Thanks a lot for your help, Tim!! I really appreciate it!

I’ll put some more time in with this and see if I can get it up and running. I’ll let you know if I get it working or if I have any more problems.

[Marshall Wetta]

Tim,

Your sudo advice worked. At first I thought it wouldn’t work because noting would show up in the terminal window when prompted for a password but I found online that entering it anyway does the trick.

I believe that I successfully created the mountpoint “lto6” in /Volumes but now I don’t know why I am unable to mount using your instructions. Here is what I did in terminal:

“Admins-iMac:~ mediamanage$ ls -l /volumes
total 8
drwxrwxr-x@ 14 mediamanage staff 544 Jul 23 11:48 ELECTUS 1195
drwx—— 1 mediamanage staff 330 Jul 4 15:15 Editor
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 1 Jul 25 11:46 Media Manage -> /
Admins-iMac:~ mediamanage$ sudo mkdir /volumes/lto6
Password:
Admins-iMac:~ mediamanage$ sudo /usr/local/bin/ltfs -o devname=0 /volumes/lto6
LTFS14000I LTFS starting, LTFS version 1.2.0, log level 2
LTFS14058I LTFS Format Specification version 2.0.0
LTFS14063I Sync type is “time”, Sync time is 300 sec
LTFS12012E Cannot open device: backend open call failed
LTFS10004E Cannot open device ‘0’
Admins-iMac:~ mediamanage$ ls -l /volumes
total 8
drwxrwxr-x@ 14 mediamanage staff 544 Jul 23 11:48 ELECTUS 1195
drwx—— 1 mediamanage staff 330 Jul 4 15:15 Editor
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 1 Jul 25 11:46 Media Manage -> /
drwxr-xr-x+ 2 root admin 68 Jul 25 13:33 lto6
Admins-iMac:~ mediamanage$ ”

Thanks for your help, Tim. Although I’m a little farther along I’m not quite there yet…