Since I'm seeing lots of people airing their woes with the NCR SCSI driver,
I thought I'd air my (mostly unrelated) SCSI problems and see if anybody
could clue me in somewhat.

I recently acquired a reconditioned (and supposedly tested) Exabyte 8505
tape drive, which (due to the general crappy state of my hardware) is now
hanging off an compaq aic6360 card (another flea market acquisition), along
with my sole SCSI disk (a Fuji M1606S-512).  Now the idea hit me that I'd
start off the year right and backup my system.

Unfortunately, this proved not to be quite as easy as I had thought... The
first few times I tried dumping my /usr partition (~ 500Meg), I'd get up to
some point in the dump and the tape drive would give up, with the following
messages printed to the console:

st0: not ready, data = 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 c7 00 00 20 00 00 00 00
		       02 00 00
(repeated 2x, then:)
st0: not ready, data = 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 c7 00 00 20 00 00 00 00
		       02 00 00

A few other times I got a "st0: (aic0:3:0) timed out" message, after what
seemed similar circumstances (tape stops writing, error condition light comes
on, tape starts rewinding).

My system is an i386 from ~ Dec 23 sources, with root on a krusty ESDI disk and
all else on the SCSI disk.  Here's the SCSI part of the probe:

aic0 at isa0 port 0x340-0x35f irq 11
scsibus0 at aic0: 8 targets
sd0 at scsibus0 targ 0 lun 0: <FUJITSU, M1606S-512, 6226> SCSI2 0/direct fixed
sd0: 1041MB, 3457 cyl, 6 head, 102 sec, 512 bytes/sec
st0 at scsibus0 targ 3 lun 0: <EXABYTE, EXB-85058SQANXR1, 06S1> SCSI2 1/sequential removable
st0: drive empty

[Incidentally, no matter how the machine boots, the SCSI system always declares 
the Exabyte to be empty, I assume because the drive isn't given enough time
to settle down between being reset and the probe...]

Dump is invoked as: 'dump -0u -B 5242880 -b 32 -f /dev/rst0 /usr', but similar
things happened when I tried to write a tar tape and also when I attempted to
read a tape I had made at work on what I believe is a very similar drive (it 
was on an Adaptec 1742 in a nicer machine...).  This does *not* happen every
time I've tried to access the drive, as I did manage to read the 500Meg of data
on the tape from work eventually and did manage to get the dump of /usr to 
finish earlier today, although after a few tries, a new tape, and then a few
more tries...

This doesn't seem to be a media problem (since I would expect that to be 
reported as such if it were...)... 

[Another side note: I tried writing a tar tape with a 64K block size, which 
seemed to go OK, but reading it gave me I/O errors with the claim that it
couldn't read a 64K blocksize...]

Any ideas (esp a clue as to what the SCSI errors I'm seeing are) quite welcome!
--rafal

PS: Termination and related issues are be OK, AFAICT.

----
Rafal Boni                                                rkboni@concentric.net