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- Path: sparky!uunet!dtix!darwin.sura.net!mips!odin!fido!twilight!zuni!anchor!olson
- From: olson@anchor.esd.sgi.com (Dave Olson)
- Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
- Subject: Re: problems with 8500 Exabyte
- Message-ID: <p34sos4@zuni.esd.sgi.com>
- Date: 27 Aug 92 04:57:21 GMT
- References: <87106@netnews.upenn.edu>
- Sender: news@zuni.esd.sgi.com (Net News)
- Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc. Mountain View, CA
- Lines: 49
-
- In <87106@netnews.upenn.edu> raines@fermi.physics.upenn.edu (Paul Edgar Raines) writes:
-
- | I have two Aviv 8500 Exabyte drives hooked up to a 4D/380S. Our
- | problems are characterized by the following:
- |
- | 1) After loading a tape into a drive, the first operation always gives
- | an I/O error. An second try of the same command always seems
- | to work.
-
- Probably not jumpered to return BUSY status when it is busy loading
- the tape. It's one of the switches on the MX board; I don't remember
- which, but 1-4 should be on, 5-8 off for 8200's; I think it is one
- of the wonderful serial port monitor options on the 8500. Ask your
- distributor to get you the firmware that works on SGI systems (Exabyte
- has it).
-
- | 2) Reading a tape always produces the following type message on the
- | system console.
- |
- | NOTICE: SCSI tape #5 had 174471 recoverable errors.
-
- Sounds a bit on the high side! Perhaps your heads need cleaning?
-
- | 3) Even when specifying 8500 on the end of the device name, the tapes
- | seem to written in low density. I haven't yet written more than
-
- Again, this can be forced by the wonderful monitor options. Get the
- correct firmware, and all will be well.
-
- | I have talked to an Aviv tech support person who believes that
- | problems (1) and (2) are related to SGI's driver not responding to
- | the 'unit attention' signal correctly.
-
- He's wrong. He either doesn't know about, or doesn't want to get
- the correct firmware.
-
- | Is there easy way to determine what density a tape has been written in?
-
- I don't think we put this into the 'mt stat' output for the 8500; although
- we probably should have.
-
- | Are there any other sources of ioctl tape commands beside the mtio man
- | page and cryptic mtio.h and tpsc.h include files?
-
- Nope. Someday...
- --
- Let no one tell me that silence gives consent, | Dave Olson
- because whoever is silent dissents. | Silicon Graphics, Inc.
- Maria Isabel Barreno | olson@sgi.com
-