3-rd party 8mm Drives

[John P. Eisenmenger]

>From article <1991Apr11.185853.17502 at aplcen.apl.jhu.edu>, by dave at visual1.jhuapl.edu (Dave Weintraub):
> A potential user brought in an 8mm drive.  We put it into the SCSI daisychain,
> restarted the system, and used SMIT to say that there was another tape drive
> on the stystem.  When we try to use it (eg, tar), the system keeps asking us
> to mount volume 1 and hit enter.

> Do I recall that there was some discussion on this a few months back? 

Yes.  As it turns out, IBM decided the standard Exabyte PROM was a bit
crufty so they replaced it with their own.  A standard SCSI 8mm drive
will therefore not work with the RS/6000.  The two options 3rd-party
vendors have are: to write a device driver for their drive, or to make
their tape drive work like IBM's.

I went through all the trials of trying to get a standard 8mm drive to
work only to find out the information above.  At least you didn't buy
the drive...

I currently have a CCG 8mm drive and it is working well (they took the
second approach).

> Any help/comments are appreciated.

> Thanks  ... Dave