ftape and floppies Supported tape drivesAll drives that are both QIC-117 compatible and either QIC-40 or
QIC-80 compatible should work. Currently, the list of drives that are known
to work with ftape is:
Although I do not want to endorse one drive type over another, I want to mention that the Colorado DJ-20 drive is rather noisy, when compared to, say, a Conner C250MQ drive ('tis said that the Colorado is 5-10 times as noisy as the Conner drive. I can't tell for sure, but I have a Colorado, and it is quite noisy).
If you have a Tallgrass FS300 and an AHA1542B, you need to increase the bus-on
/ bus-off time of the 1542B. Antti Virjo (klanvi@uti.fi), says that
changing CMD_BUSON_TIME to 4 and CMD_BUSOFF_CMD to 12 in
linux/drivers/scsi/aha1542.c will do the trick.
One user has reported that ftape works (partially) the with Conner
TSM420R drive, which supports both QIC-80 (normal) and ``QIC-WIDE'' tapes. As
of right now, ftape does not support the QIC-WIDE tapes, and
you should consider it it sheer luck that the TSM420R works at all with
ftape (or any other QIC-WIDE drive). Whether the TSM420R drive will
be supported fully some day, is an open question. If you have a drive that
can use QIC-WIDE tapes, are interested in getting it to work with
ftape, and not afraid of being ALPHA tester, drop Bas
<bas@vimec.nl> a mail, stating which drive you have.
NOTE: If you have a drive that works fine, but it is not listed here, please
send a mail to the HOWTO maintainer (khp@pip.dknet.dk).
These dedicated high-speed tape controllers are supported by
ftape-1.14d:
Support for the FC-10 controller has been merged into the ftape
driver in version 1.12. See the RELEASE-NOTES and the
Makefile files in the ftape distribution.
The support for the MACH-2 controller was added in ftape-1.14d.
Anti-Colorado message:
As of lately, Colorado has proved themselves totally unwilling to help with FC-10 and FC-20 support. This is sad, and can only force me to say: Don't buy a Colorado high-speed controller, or even a Colorado tape drive. Why support a manufacturer, who does not want to support his own product?
Generally, ALL drives that connect to the parallel port are NOT supported. This is because these drives uses (different) proprietary interfaces, that are very much different from the QIC-117 standard.
The Colorado TC-15 controller (and it's like) are not supported directly by
the ftape driver. The only `special' controllers that can be used
with ftape is the Colorado FC-10 and the Mountain MACH-2 (see above).
The Irwin AX250L (and the IBM Internal Tape Backup Unit) does not work the
ftape. This is because they only support QIC-117, but not the QIC-80
standard (they use Irwin's proprietary servoe (Rhomat) format). I know
nothing about the Rhomat format, nor where to get any info on it. Sorry.
ftape If you have a floppy controller which has a female DB37 connector on the
bracket (and some means of delivering power to the drive), you can use it with
ftape. OK, that sentence was not very obvious. Let's try it this
way: Some FDC's (the very ancient one's), have a DB37 connector on the
bracket, for connecting to external floppy drives.
If you make a suitable cable (from a quick glance on an FDC that I've got
lying around, it seems to be a straight 1-to-1 cable. However, your milage may
vary) from the DB37 connector (on the FDC) and to your external tape drive,
you can get ftape to control your tape drive.
This is because that from a program's view there is no difference between the
internal and the external connectors. So, from ftape's point of view,
they are identical.
ftape Unfortunately, some PCI motherboards cause problems when running
ftape. Some people have experienced that ftape would not
run in a PCI based box, but ran flawlessly in a normal ISA based 386DX
machine. To quote from the RELEASE-NOTES file in the
ftape-1.14d distribution:
More PCI news:
--------------
There have been more reports about PCI problems, some of them
were solved by upgrading the (flash) BIOS.
Other rumours are that it has to do with the FDC being on the
PCI bus, but that is not the case with the Intel Premiere boards.
Here is a list of systems and the BIOS versions known to work:
board: bios revision:
Intel Premiere PCI (Revenge) 1.00.09.AF2
Intel Premiere PCI II (Plato) 1.00.08.AX1 (disable GAT in BIOS!)
1.00.10.AX1
To see if you're having the GAT problem, try making a backup
under DOS. If it's very slow and often repositions you're
probably having this problem.
PCI news:
---------
There have been some problem reports from people using PCI-bus based
systems getting overrun errors.
I wasn't able to reproduce these until I ran ftape on a Intel Plato
(Premiere PCI II) motherboard with bios version 1.00.08AX1.
It turned out that if GAT (Guaranteed Access Timing) is enabled (?)
ftape gets a lot of overrun errors.
The problem disappears when disabling GAT in the bios.
Note that Intel removed this setting (permanently disabled) from the
1.00.10AX1 bios !
It looks like that if GAT is enabled there are often large periods
(greater than 120 us !??) on the ISA bus that the DMA controller cannot
service the floppy disk controller.
I cannot imagine this being acceptable in a decent PCI implementation.
Maybe this is a `feature' of the chipset. I can only speculate why
Intel choose to remove the option from the latest Bios...
The lesson of this all is that there may be other motherboard
implementations having the same of similar problems.
If you experience a lot of overrun errors during a backup to tape,
see if there is some setting in the Bios that may influence the
bus timing.
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