Archive Viper 150 tape drive on sun/4

[Jack A. Zucker]

I recently bought a Sparcstation 1. I am using an Archive Viper 150
(2150s) tape drive, as well as a Micropolis hard disk. The tape drive
works fine from Unix doing tar creates and extracts to and from the tape.
I've also used the drive to install other commercial software without any
problems.  However, during suninstall for release 4.03c, I get the
following message:

st0: Request sense couldn't sense data. 

This error occurs during the software information menu on suninstall. Up
until this point, the tape reads fine. The media itself is good, as I can
tar any of the files off the tape by forward spacing to the appropriate
file and extracting from the tape. When I called sun about this, they
refused to support me because the tape drive was not a Sun tape unit.
(Even though sun uses the archive viper 150, and it's listed on the man
page for "st").

BTW - The tape is set up as SCSI ID 4 (st0), the disk is set up as SCSI
ID 0 (sd3). The logical to physical address mapping is apparently translated
by an editable parameter in eeprom. I could remap SCSI ID 0 to sd0 but I
figure that Sun set it up this way for some purpose. Yes, the bus is
terminated, etc. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, the sun tapes are in QIC 24
format.

I'm wondering if there is a time-out parameter I can increase in the
device driver...  I don't want to encounter this problem the next time I
install some software from SUN.

Thanks in advance.

Jack A. Zucker
jaz at calvin.icd.ab.com