> 
> > It's a failing mode sense. Why it's failing with an illegal request seems
> > odd. It's not supposed to be chatty.
> 
> > What release is this?
> 
> Sorry, I thought I put that in. 19981207 snapshot of current. Once we can
> use the 19990305 snapshot, I intend to try it. Unfortunately, until I get a
> new SCSI cable in place I won't have disk space to compile my own kernel.
> 
> And to answer the previous question, I have tried with tar, both on read
> and write. The exact problem occurs even when attempting to do an
> "mt rewind". It's the problem with mt that prompted this letter.
> 
> I don't think it's hardware, because I have a second EXB-8200 on loan, and
> it behaves the same way. One other detail that I failed to mention: these
> are IBM relabeled drives.

Ah!!!!! IBM Special F/W. How special! It seems like somewhat older f/w if
not.

They're failing on one of the initial mode sense during tape mount time
that occurs on an open where it tries to sense the state of WRITE PROTECT
and current density codes. It may be that this particular f/w needs a
DISABLE BLOCK DESCRIPTORS bit set for this command to succeed.

I'm not doing much with NetBSD these days- but if you take this offline
and poke me a couple of times, I'll try and gen you a kernel to try to see
if this fixes the problem.

-matt