From: vj@gserv1.dl.ac.uk (Dave Hines) Subject: [Q] SCSI tape drive problems Date: 21 Apr 1993 13:34:28 GMT
Dear all,
Can anyone help please... I am having problems writing data to a SCSI
tape drive.
The drive can read tapes with no problems - I've read & CRC checked around
120Mb of tapes written on a Sun. When writing tapes under Linux no error
messages are generated, but reading them back shows the data to be corrupt.
A 30Mb tar file on reading back would have around 20% of the files in in it
mangled. I suspect, but have not yet checked, that data blocks are being
either dropped or duplicated when the tape is written.
The drive still works OK when attached to a Sun. The Sun bootup code reports
it to be "<Emulex MT02 QIC-11/QIC-24>". The Linux boot code appears to be
unable to read the vendor & version strings for the tape, though it does
report the data block size limits as 512 - 512 bytes.
As both the disks & tape are on the same SCSI bus, I tried increasing the
transfer rate of the Adaptec controller from 5Mb/s to 6.7Mb/s (8Mb/s hung
the machine). This had no apparent effect.
System: 486DX2/66, 8Mb memory, ISA bus
Adaptec 1542b controller + two SCSI disks (SCSI devices 0 & 3)
One old ex-Sun QIC tape drive system, comprising:
an Emulex controller/formatter (SCSI device 4)
an Archive tape drive
Running Linux 0.99p8, libc-4.3.3 (the same fault occurs using
Linux 0.99p7 with libc-4.3.2).
If anyone has any (constructive ;-) suggestions, please let me know.
Thanks, Dave.