Problems with Delta Micro 8mm Tape Drive on 4D/20

[Michael Dahl]

We have attached a Delta Micro Systems SS-2000T 8mm tape drive to
our 4D/20 and are having a couple of problems that make it very
difficult to use.

Power-on diagnostics will fail unless the tape drive is turned on,
and the system disk will be corrupted unless the tape drive is
powered on when unix boots.  It takes a couple hours to reload the
system software when the disk gets corrupted.  The disk also gets
corrupted if the system auto-reboots for any reason.

When everything goes right, the drive works great.  Unfortunately
something seems to go wrong often enough to make life miserable.

The following is the error we get if the tape drive is turned on
during power-on diagnostics:

sc0 Unexpected Transfer Phase. State= 4b Phase= 31
scsi(0, 3, 0) transfer aborted (Hardware error)
Device 3 failed DMA test
doscsi: sc0 error: Hardware timeout

The 8mm tape drive is at scsi address 3, and we have a disk at 1 and
the internal streaming tape at 2.

Any help in getting this straighted out would be greatly appreciated.

Michael Dahl
Cimplex Corp.
dahl at netcom.uucp or {apple,claris}!netcom!dahl
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Michael Dahl
Cimplex Corp.
dahl at netcom.uucp or {apple,claris}!netcom!dahl