On Wed, Aug 01, 2001 at 10:14:50PM +0800, Chris Collet wrote:
> I set up netboot yesterday and got the 9000 to boot NetBSD. The 7980 and 7978 
> work, but only sometimes. For one, I couldn't write anything to them even though
> I write enabled the tapes. Two, about 50% of the time I tried to access a tape 
> it would panic and reboot. The 7978 can do both 1600 and 6250, or at least it looks
> that way. I'm not very familiar with tape drives and NetBSD, so you'll have to give
> me specific examples of what you want me to try. Also, all the tapes I have were 
> from my PDP-11, so they're all formatted at 1600 (although the labels claim they 
> can do 6250). I tried using mt erase to clear them but that caused another panic.

Can you send the error messages when you try to write and the panic-messages
and maybe a stack trace when it goes down (if you have DDB in kernel) ?

> Right now they're connected to the slow HPIB controller, but I can give it a try 
> on the fast one, too.  

Interestingly I never got them to work on the fast HP-IB controller but they did
work on the slow one (for some value of "work" :) I've never had panics with them
though. Can you read anything from the tapes with say, dd ?

# dd if=/dev/rmt* of=/tmp/something bs=10240 count=100
(substitute correct drive of course).

This worked for me when writing, note that rmt8 still refers to mt0 !

#dd if=/tmp/2_meg_file of=/dev/nrmt8 bs=10240

I'm not sure about the block sizes.

> The HP 3000 is a 947. The main hard disk is sort of dead 
> plus I don't know the account password, so It's more or less useless until I can 
> find tapes of MPE/iX.

Hey, that's ~10 times faster than the Micro GX I'll be getting :) That's really
going to be fun as I know *nothing* about MPE...

-- 
jht