Date: Fri, 04 Apr 1997 19:43:29 -0600 From: dkelly@hiwaay.net To: Security Administrator <sadmin@roundtable.cif.rochester.edu> Cc: scsi@FreeBSD.ORG (FreeBSD Scsi) Subject: Re: exabyte problems Message-ID: <199704050143.TAA12270@nexgen.hiwaay.net> In-Reply-To: Message from Security Administrator <sadmin@roundtable.cif.rochester.edu> of "Fri, 04 Apr 1997 16:05:48 EST." <199704042105.QAA18369@roundtable.cif.rochester.edu>
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> Howdy,
>
> I have an Exabyte 8500 and it is NOT working properly. I was assured
> by its previous owner that the drive was in perfect working condition,
> but the moment that I added it to my SCSI chain on my FreeBSD 2.2.1
> system, it barfed. To be specific, I have an Adaptec 2940UW card with
> two SCSI-III drives on one chain and the SCSI-I tape drive off another
> ribbon cable. Whenever I try to write to the drive, it has a slew of
> write errors that kill whatever process is trying use the device.
> Neither dump nor tar are immune.
Whenever I've had any kind of problems like you describe ("worked perfectly
for me") with Exabyte tape drives the magic bullet was to download new
firmware from Exabyte. Recently moved an 8500 from a Sun 4/470 to an SGI
Crimson. It didn't quite work on the SGI. Would run for a while then the
somebody got confused and the SGI would reset the SCSI bus after waiting 4
minutes. Of course it worked perfectly on the Sun.
New firmware from Exabyte was a pain to figure out how/what to download
from their site (seems like you need 3 sets of firmware, CPU, servos, and
something else). And then I had to find a Windows host (with an Adaptec's
DOS standard driver, ASPI?) to apply the firmware updates. Actually I think
I used a DOS updater, not the Windows one.
--
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@hiwaay.net
=====================================================================
The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its
capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system.
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