by Hi all,
I have a Tandberg 3600 SCSI tape drive (but no manual) and an Ultrastor 34f
controller. I am running the latest SLS (not the new alpha stuff) and have
installed the newer libs and upgraded to the pl10 kernel.
When I first installed everything and recompiled my Kernel for the new card,
everything came up just fine and Linux recognized the card and tape drive
correctly. I was able to write to the tape (a 6150) with the 'tar -czvf
/dev/rmt0 *' command. When I went to read the files back from the tape,
however, the drive sounds like it is going back and forth over a short bit
of tape at the beginning (searching for some sort of index?), and then I get
the following message:
tar: read error on /dev/rmt0 : I/O error
I found a little hint about the 34F controller suggesting that people should
use 340H as the port I/O base address, so I set things up to use it
(although nothing seems to have changed).
Even more strangely, for a couple tries, I couldn't even write to the tape.
I got an error saying that the SCSI host has timed out, and the whole thing
locked up on me. I haven't been able to reapeat this behavior.
Do you have any clues? Am I missing something here? I haven't seen any
mention in the docs I have regarding formatting tapes for these drives. Do
they have to be formatted in some way like my old QIC-80 tapes did?
In the 'mt' man page, it mentions a couple parameters that may need to be set
to specific densities (setblk, setdensity). Do I need to know what these
are?
Sometimes I am able to write some files to the tape (without errors),
and then to read some of them back onto my hard drive (yay!). 'tar -xvf
/dev/rmt0' read back two files, and then said 'tar: Skipping to next file
header...' and then just sat there. ^C stopped the tar process no problem,
so it wasn't a lock up. I remember reading about someone else having a
problem with their tape drive stopping after a certain number of bytes had
been written to the tape. What was the solution to that problem?
I tried using the 'tar -b 3000...' buffering option, but it doesn't seem to
help any.
Any help would be appreciated.
-- Kevin
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Kevin Fluet Call V.A.L.I.S. Public Access Linux
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (temporarily down)
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