All,

If this is not the correct forum, please forgive me and tell me the correct
place to post.

I have an AS200 (4/233) with a TK50Z-GA attached.  The boot messages from
dmesg can be viewed here:

<http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dundas/alpha/dmesg.txt>

First, it appears that the TK50 is not recognized other than as a generic
SCSI tape drive (st0).  I suppose that's fine, though I wonder if it is the
cause of the crash I am experiencing (to be described).  In googling
through some of the old netbsd archives, I see some patches specifically
aimed at this drive (though they were in the VAX port).  However none of
this code is in the current st driver.  Should/could it be there?

Well, what I'm trying to accomplish is to make .TAP archives of TK50 tapes.
I have written a small program to read the tape and write an appropriately
formatted disk file.  The program may be viewed here:

<http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dundas/alpha/tapin.c>

The program has generally worked just fine.  However I have encountered a
system crash (and thus the motivation for the email) with, I believe, one
type of tape.  [Specifically, the last or only tape in a VMS backup save
set archive.  Seems consistent with these.]  The most recent crash,
yesterday, is listed below.  I apologize in advance for the
hand-transcribed crash data as I don't have a way to get this
electronically at this time.  If there are any errors it is due to my
transcription; the transcript has been edited slightly.

st0 (siop0:0:0:0): Check condition on CDB: 0x08 00 00 80 00 00
    SENSE KEY: Recovered Error
               Incorrect Length Indicator Set
   INFO FIELD: 16867328
 COMMAND INFO: 671088743 (0x28000067)
     ASC/ASCQ: No Index/Sector Signal

panic: Kernel diagnostic assertion "done >= 0" failed
       file ...kern/kern_physio.c, line 222

Stopped in pid 236 (tapin) at cpu_Debugger+0x4: ret zero,(ra)
db>

The tapin program was indeed running at the time.  Partial output from the
program can be viewed from the script output at:

<http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dundas/alpha/crash.txt>

Note that this is only a partial transcript of stdout as the complete file
was not recovered after the system crashed.

Any suggestions about where to start and how to proceed are very much
appreciated.

Thanks,

John