Hi All,

I'm hoping someone can help me with a serious problem. I just setup a
Gateway Athlon 600 box with NetBSD 1.6. I was very excited because I thought
it would make an ideal server and make tape backups easy because it has a
20GB internal ATAPI Travan 8/20GB tape backup drive. I did the install got
Samba up and running--everything was going great until I put a tape in the
tape drive and entered "mt status". The system hung.

So, I pulled up another console and rebooted the server. Of course, the tape
was still in the drive and as the boot sequence and kernel messages were
appearing on screen, when it got to the tape drive (which it was recognizing
as st0) it gave me the following error and then kernel panicked into the
debugger:

---begin dmesg excerpt

st0 at atapibus 0 drive 1: (Seagate STT20000A,  , 8N437 type 1 sequential
removable
st0: st0(pciide0:1:1): polling command not done
panic: scsipi_execute_xs
stopped in pid 0 (swapper) at cpu_Debugger +0x4: leave

---end dmesg excerpt

BTW, the system boots just fine as long as there is NO tape in the drive.

Also, the IDE controller is a "AMD 756 IDE controller rev 0x03"

Now, I've searched for tape drives and NetBSD for hours and was unable to
find any recent helpful information regarding this. The NetBSD 1.6 i386
install document states the following tape drives are supported:

Tape drives
- Most SCSI tape drives
- Seagate and OnStream ATAPI tape drives, possibly others
- QIC-02 and QIC-36 format (Archive- and Wangtek- compatible) tape drives
[*] [+]

One more detail, the tape ide device is being polled using mode 4 or
something like that. Is it possible that BIOS is setup incorrectly for this
device (currently set to auto-detect).

Thanks for any help you might be able to give!

Sean

PS--Just in case--let's assume that this ends up being a trash drive and I'm
going to go out and buy a new SCSI tape drive and SCSI host adapter card.
Which card should I buy and what tape backup drive around $200-$250 should I
buy. I have 5 hours left on the clock to get the drive installed and backups
(and restores :-) working. I need the bottom line answer here as this is our
accounting server and I've got to have a good backup system in place.