[ale] SCSI Travan Tape Drive I/O Error - More Info

[Jeff Hubbs]

Last night, I reversed the positions of the CD-RW and the tape drive on the
SCSI cable, undid termination on the tape drive (removed term and term power
jumpers), and put the term jumper on the CD-RW drive.  I left the SCSI IDs
the same (0 and 1 - the card's ID is 7).

The behavior was exactly the same as described below.  This leads me to
believe that my problem is not a bus termination issue.  Does it seem
reasonable that I may need to try a different SCSI card?

- Jeff



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeff [mailto:jhubbs at telocity.com]
> Sent: Sunday, June 04, 2000 12:53 AM
> To: ale at ale.org
> Subject: [ale] SCSI Travan Tape Drive I/O Error
> 
> 
> Under Mandrake 7.0-2 with Gnome/Enlightenment, I've got a 
> Seagate Hornet
> 20GB (Traval) SCSI tape drive sitting along with a Ricoh 
> CD-RW drive on
> an SIIG AP-10 Fast (narrow) SCSI card.  This card has auto 
> termination.
> The CD-RW drive is unterminated and has SCSI ID 0.  The tape 
> drive is at
> the end of the cable and has its termination power and its termination
> enabled via jumper.  Parity checking is turned off via jumper and is
> likewise disabled in the SCSI card's BIOS.
> 
> Here is the kind of exchange I get when I try something like 
> backing up
> my /boot partition to tape:
> 
>      # tar -cvf /dev/st0 /boot
>      tar: Removing leading `/' from archive names
>      boot/
>      boot/lost+found/
>      boot/boot.b
>      boot/chain.b
>      boot/os2_d.b
>      boot/System.map-2.2.14-15mdk
>      tar: Cannot write to /dev/st0: Input/output error
>      tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
> 
> Now, the command
> 
>      mt -f /dev/st0 retension
> 
> works, but
> 
>      mt -f /dev/st0 datcompress
> 
> (which is supposed to return the compression flag status of the drive)
> gives me
> 
>      /dev/st0: Can't read SCSI mode page.
>      /dev/st0: Can't read compression mode page.
> 
> So, the tape drive isn't completely dead - just wounded.  FWIW, the
> CD-RW drive works normally, at least in read (I haven't tried write).
> 
> Can any of you tell, from the kind of error I'm getting when 
> I use tar,
> at least what class of problem I'm looking at?  It's really important
> that I get this tape drive working because I want to save 
> this machine's
> state so I can revert back to it when I bollocks the system up
> completely.
> 
> - Jeff
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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