Problem no. 2 Solved - Tape drive door ajar - or so the sensor said
Problem no. 1 Re-Addressed - Can't use "z" with Tapes?

Friday nights are evidently a good time for investigations. Upon this
gentlemen's suggestion I downloaded ALPHA yesterday, and installed it on
a fresh drive. Anyway to make a long story short, the Archive just started
working! Even in NetBSD-1.2.1. Messing with it a liitle I noticed it wasn't
always recognizing the tape lock position of the "door". Dusty sensor or
something.

So it's back to the original problem I had.

This works:
simmons@dakkon[53]% tar cvf /dev/rst0 edge
edge/
edge/OTE.cardlist
edge/OnTheEdge.cardlist
simmons@dakkon[54]%

This, however, does not:
simmons@dakkon[57]% tar cvzf /dev/rst0 edge
edge/
edge/OTE.cardlist
edge/OnTheEdge.cardlist
tar (child): can't write to /dev/rst0 : Input/output error
simmons@dakkon[58]%

Nov  8 07:14:53 dakkon /netbsd: st0: bad request, must be multiple of 512

The question is: Is "z" not a valid option for tapes? Or is there something
missing in the driver. (I saw something in ther about residuals not being
finished or something. Is this related?)

Hardware Guy
Gerry Simmons

---------  Received message begins Here  ---------

> From mjacob@ns.feral.com Thu Nov  6 17:16:23 1997
> X-Authentication-Warning: dakkon.darykon.cet.com: simmons set sender to mjacob@ns.feral.com using -f
> Date: Thu, 6 Nov 1997 17:54:08 -0800
> From: Matthew Jacob <mjacob@ns.feral.com>
> To: current-users@NetBSD.ORG, port-i386@NetBSD.ORG, simmons@darykon.cet.com
> Subject: Re: AIC7XXX driver - No Tape support for writing?
> 
> Get closer to -current and turn on SCSIVERBOSE and then send me the output- 
> I doubt it's an AIC specific issue- it's more likely a tape driver<>Archive
> issue. Specifically the 'illegal request' check conditions- I'm wondering
> which command caused them agita.
> 
> Also- do us a favor and check to make sure you have DC 6150 or better
> tape (open the gate on the cartridge- if the tape is dull instead of
> shiny, you have QIC-24 tape- and you can't write that on an Archve Viper
> drive although you can read it...)
> 
>