On Oct 20, 12:36pm, "Robert D. Keys" wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > does anyone have experience connecting a QIC tape drive to a DS3100?
> > The drive is prperly detected at bootup, but any attemp to access it 
> > vat 'mt' or 'tar' gives nothing but "illegal request" erros :-(  To
> > make it really strange, the same drive works perfectly on a 5000/200
> > running also 1.3.2 .  My suspicion ios therefore that something goes
> > wrong in the sii driver...any ideas?
> > 
> > Alfred Arnold  
...
> So the question is.... will the Archive Viper QIC tape drive work
> correctly with the DS3100 or do I need to try a different install
> approach?

  The tape drive will probably not work.  The pmax tape driver is not
very generic, and may not handle drives that the driver doesn't recognize.
One problem I've run into is that one of the SCSI drivers (probably the
SII driver on the 3100) would fail if the data transfer length requested
was smaller that what the device tried to send.  The tz tape driver defaults
the modesense length to 12, which failed when trying to read the 14 bytes
returned by the TZ30 tape drive.  After the tz driver was modified to
recognize the TZ30 and adjust the modesense length, it worked.

  It's also possible that the "GENERIC SCSI" code in the tz driver is
probably trying to do things with the drive that are invalid, and would
result in the "Illegal Request" errors.

  What would probably need to be done would be to add a check for the
tape drive identification in the inquire data and add a new tape type.
Then locate the place(s) in the tz driver that is sending a command the
tape drive doesn't like and adjust the driver accordingly [i.e. either
don't issue that particular command, or modify the command to something
the tape drive likes].

> that could use standard DC-6150 tapes.  Is that reasonable, and
> will the drivers handle it correctly or do I need to stick to
> that funny DEC tape thing?  I was thinking there was some sort
> of DC-6150 tape available for the machines (TZ210 or something
> like that, but now I am beginning to get confused).

  DEC does have one or more QIC drives, but they would not be currently
supported by the tz driver.  [If I had any of these QIC drives, I could
probably get the driver fixed to handle them.]

Michael

-- 
Michael L. Hitch			mhitch@montana.edu
Computer Consultant
Information Technology Center
Montana State University	Bozeman, MT	USA