SCSI tape drive with Adaptec adapter...

[Gregory Gulik]

C. Linus Hicks wrote:
> You didn't say, but you did disable termination in the tape drive when
> you tried the cable that has its own terminator, right?

Yes, I disabled the tape drive's on-board termination.

> I would ask your brother-in-law to try your tape drive in his system. If
> it works, get him to try your SCSI adapter. Unless you know for sure
> that it works, the test you did with the old CD-ROM drive you have only
> proves there is a problem, which we know.

I'll have to do that next.

I did try the same card and tape drive combo in an older piece of 
hardware I have, which is also running Fedora Core 2.  I had the exact 
same issues there.

To summarize the symptoms:

The card's BIOS recognizes the drive.  Every time the bus gets reset the 
tape in the drive re-tensions.

Upon boot with the card kudzu asks me if I want to configure the card. 
I tell it to go ahead and configure it.

When done booting I find that the device is not seen and the aic7xxx 
driver is NOT loaded.

When I manually load the aix7xxx driver with modprobe the tape 
re-tensions and dmesg shows the following:
scsi1 : Adaptec AIC7XXX EISA/VLB/PCI SCSI HBA DRIVER, Rev 6.2.36
         <Adaptec 2940A Ultra SCSI adapter>
         aic7860: Ultra Single Channel A, SCSI Id=7, 3/253 SCBs

(scsi1:A:4): 5.000MB/s transfers (5.000MHz, offset 15)
   Vendor: CONNER    Model: CTT8000-S         Rev: 1.17
   Type:   Sequential-Access                  ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Attached scsi generic sg1 at scsi1, channel 0, id 4, lun 0,  type 1
st: Version 20040403, fixed bufsize 32768, s/g segs 256
Attached scsi tape st0 at scsi1, channel 0, id 4, lun 0
st0: try direct i/o: yes (alignment 512 B), max page reachable by HBA 
1048575

Any attempt to access the st0 tape device results in the following:

[root at crashnburn root]# mt -f /dev/st0 status
/dev/st0: Input/output error
[root at crashnburn root]# gtar tzf /dev/st0
tar (child): /dev/st0: Cannot open: Input/output error
tar (child): Error is not recoverable: exiting now

gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file
gtar: Child returned status 2
gtar: Error exit delayed from previous errors


Do IDE tape drives work in Fedora?  Will my backups be compatible with a 
different drive?   This drive doesn't have hardware compression.


-- 
Greg Gulik                                 http://www.gulik.org/greg/
greg @ gulik.org