Hi,

I mailed to this list about my tape drive failing curiously at the
same time as some one else's during NetBSD install. I guessed then it
was just a coincidence, and only mailed because there was a remote
chance it really was a problem with NetBSD, but I can now say it
wasn't.

The symptom was that any tape screamed horribly even with ``mt ret'',
and then got stuck. I opened up the shoebox, cleaned the rubber wheel
which makes the tape run, but the problem was the motor's axle, which
I diagnosed by moving the drive belt by fingers. There was a bad
squeak which came from the motor. I removed the drive, turned it
upside down, and dropped some Esso 10W30 to the tip of the axle with a
screwdriver.

Problem solved, I dumped SunOS /usr, sliced off 8 megs to use as
NetBSD root, and restored /usr from tape. This took a while, so I
won't start installing NetBSD today. Maybe Tuesday. I had to make a
root on sd0 for NetBSD, because the ROM version I have (1.6) won't
boot off any other SCSI disk (at least not from sd2).

As indicated in the subject header, this is just info for anyone who
might be interested.

Jari Kokko