Action

First, find out which device is experiencing the I/O error. If the device is a tape drive, make sure a tape is inserted into the drive. When this error occurs with a tape in the drive, it is likely that the tape contains an unrecoverable bad spot.

If the device is a floppy drive, an unformatted or defective diskette could be at fault. Format the diskette, or obtain a replacement.

If the device is a hard disk drive, you might need to run fsck(1M) and possibly even reformat the disk.