Re: TAPE problems with 3.0e of Linux NCR538XX SCSI drivers

Michael Meissner (meissner@cygnus.com)
Mon, 13 Jul 1998 21:12:52 -0400

| On Mon, 13 Jul 1998, Michael Meissner wrote:
|
| > I have a dual pentium Pro machine with 2 SCSI controllers (one TekRam
| > 390U that has a DAT tape drive on it and a CDROM, and the other TekRam
| > 390F that has 2 narrow barracudas and 1 wide barracuda on it), running
| > RedHat 5.1 with updates. I upgraded the linux kernel 1.0.5 (with the
| > 2.5f version of the SCSI drivers for NCR53C8XX) to 1.0.8 (version 3.0e
| > of the SCSI drivers) with the Alan Cox patches applied. Whenever my
| > nightly scripts try to do a dump, they first do a:
| >
| > st -f /dev/nst0 rewind
| >
| > The SCSI controller spits out the following message to the syslog:
| >
| > Jul 12 03:04:11 tiktok kernel: SCSI host 0 abort (pid 34805) timed out - resetting
|
| The SCSI tape driver timeout is by default 900 seconds.
| Is it enough to rewind the tape ? (I guess yes).
| Driver 3.0e reads the NVRAM by default. If you did'nt enable this
| feature in 2.1.105, then the NVRAM setup may have changed the
| device configuration assumed by the driver. The driver will ignore
| the NVRAM if you enter the following option at boot up.
| ncr53c8xx=nvram:n
| Could you check that the controller setup in the NVRAM has SCSI
| disconnection enabled for all devices.

I did enable the feature. However further testing shows something else,
presumably hardware problems is going on. I can't access the driver via either
2.5f of the NCR53C8XX drivers or the Adaptec 2940UW driver (both of these
previously worked with the drive, and I didn't do any hardware hacking). So
now the problem is who fixes DAT drives, and what do they charge :-(

Thanks for the help.

--
Michael Meissner, Cygnus Solutions (Massachusetts office)
4th floor, 955 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
meissner@cygnus.com,	617-354-5416 (office),	617-354-7161 (fax)




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