SCSI Tapes on 386/ix (aha1540)

Dirk Koeppen dirk at dksoft.UUCP
Wed Sep 6 20:40:50 AEST 1989


I just tried to connect a SCSI tape to 386/ix rel. 2.0.2 with their
included tape driver but it does not recognize the tape drive.

I use the aha1540 as the second controller and therefore use maj/min 41/72.
ISC says that you can use any SCSI ID with the tape but on my system the
tape will only be recognized if I use SCSI IDs > 3 and very strange there
must be a disk connected onto the SCSI otherwhise nothing will be accepted.

When using a Tandberg TD 3660 streamer which is fairly compatible to
the Wangtek drives and also fixed-block (512 Bytes) the system boots, scans
the SCSI for devices, rewinds the tape and then the system hangs. 

Using a GIGATAPE (one of these 1,2G DAT-drives) gives better results. The
systems boots as expected. But when I try to read/write the tape I get
the message 'Variable-sized records on dumb DMA tape!' and the system 
dumps. I used this TC_GETPARMS ioctl call for the gentape device and it
gives me a variable-block sized tape which is ok but it also tells that
the blocksize is set to 1 byte. 

Does anybody have better experience with the 386/ix tape driver ?

thanx,
dirk at incom.de



More information about the Comp.unix.i386 mailing list