From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Feb 21 18:25:14 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from dan.emsphone.com (dan.emsphone.com [199.67.51.101]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 775DE10E36 for ; Sun, 21 Feb 1999 18:25:12 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from dan@dan.emsphone.com) Received: (from dan@localhost) by dan.emsphone.com (8.9.1/8.9.1) id UAA45694; Sun, 21 Feb 1999 20:24:01 -0600 (CST) Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 20:23:59 -0600 From: Dan Nelson To: Greg Black Cc: David Kelly , Jon Drukman , freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: tape drive position Message-ID: <19990221202358.A45583@dan.emsphone.com> References: <199902200040.SAA81105@nospam.hiwaay.net> <19990220020117.4326.qmail@alpha.comkey.com.au> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.3i In-Reply-To: <19990220020117.4326.qmail@alpha.comkey.com.au>; from "Greg Black" on Sat Feb 20 12:01:16 GMT 1999 X-OS: FreeBSD 3.1-STABLE Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In the last episode (Feb 20), Greg Black said: > > The only way I know to ID a compressed tape is to put it in a DDS > > drive which doesn't support compression and see what happens. Same > > for Irix and FreeBSD. > > One problem with the method is that, on several BSD variants and with > at least two brands of DDS-1 (no compression) drives, what happens is > a system lockup. This is the only thing (apart from my own > stupidity) that has ever forced me to reboot a BSD system. I've got an old DDS-1 drive that likes locking up on compressed tapes. If I listen to the drive during the "lockup", it sounds like it's retensioning the tape; seeking BOT to EOT and back again over and over. there's nothing BSD can do at this point; the drive is completely unusable. I usually end up having to open the case and unplug the power from the tape drive. The entire machine reboots maybe 1 out 10 times I do this. The other 9 times everything goes back to normal and I can continue using the drive (with a different tape of course :) sa0 at ahc0 bus 0 target 3 lun 0 sa0: Removable Sequential Access SCSI-2 device sa0: 5.0MB/s transfers (5.0MHz, offset 15) -Dan Nelson dnelson@emsphone.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message