ISC UNIX 2.2 & tape drive

Todd Ogasawara todd at uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu
Sun Jul 22 05:08:57 AEST 1990


I just installed Interactive UNIX 2.2 on my Everex Step 386/33
yesterday and am having a problem with my 150MB Wangtek drive with a
QIC-36 controller. My problem is the usual one you see written about
here: the drive is not streaming when I write to or read from the
tape.

The tape drive and controller worked at the advertised 5Mb/minute rate
when I tested the unit with MS-DOS 3.3 and the Everex supplied tape
software. The problem only turned up after I dumped MS-DOS and
installed ISC UNIX 2.2.

One problem that was immediately evident were constant messages on the
console screen about an "ASY interrupt" conflict. I disabled the
serial port driver and that message went away on the next 'tar' test.
However, the tape still did not stream. I tried both 'dd' and 'ddd' to
see if they would work better. But they did no better than tar (about
10 minutes to save 500kbytes of files).

I'm planning to call Interactive on Monday to see if I can get some
tech support on my newly purchased ISC 2.2. However, given the
comments I've seen in this newsgroup about ISC support, I don't expect
to get any helpful answers from them (I'm really beginning to think I
should have followed my initial impulse to buy ESIX now!). So, if
anyone has any ideas (device incompatibilities, interrupt collisions,
etc.), please let me know. My hardware is configured as follows.

Everex Step 386/33, 256K cache, 8M RAM
15mbps Adaptec ESDI hard disk/floppy controller
770MB Maxtor (660M formatted) hard disk drive
Everex serial/parallel card (standard with the Step 386/33)
Everex Super VGA card with Everex Viewpoint color VGA display
Digiboard PC/16i serial I/O board (no interrupts used as instructed
	by the Digiboard instructions for use with 386/ix 2.0.2)
	The Digiboard and its driver software seems to work fine
	with ISC 2.2, btw.

Thanks for any help anyone out there can give me!...todd
-- 
Todd Ogasawara, U. of Hawaii
UUCP:		{uunet,ucbvax,dcdwest}!ucsd!nosc!uhccux!todd
ARPA:		uhccux!todd at nosc.MIL		BITNET: todd at uhccux
INTERNET:	todd at uhccux.UHCC.HAWAII.EDU



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