Date: Mon, 17 Mar 1997 22:10:31 -0800 (PST) From: patl@Phoenix.Volant.ORG To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Exabyte 8505 questions Message-ID: <ML-2.3.858665431.7515.patl@asimov.phoenix.volant.org>
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I just bought a reconditioned Exabyte 8505 tape drive; and have been having a few problems using it. The problems are exacerbated by the lack of an Owner's Manual. The first, and hopefully simplest problem is determining which density codes are actually valid for the drive; and what they mean in terms of capacity and compatability. The default appears to be 0x8c. According to the panel lights it is a compressed mode; and I would assume the maximum density for the drive (5Gb for a 112m tape.) But there should also be uncompressed high density, and both compressed and uncompressed low (2.5Gb) modes. The second problem appears to be related to timeouts. When attempting to tar with large block sizes (56Kb), after a while it reports: ncr0: timeout ccb=f174ec0 (skip) ncr0: timeout ccb=f174ee0 (skip) ncr0: timeout ccb=f174ea0 (skip) then wedges the OS badly enough to require a hard reset. The system is an ASUS PCI/I-486SP3G with a Cyrix 486/66DX2, using the SCSI controller built into the main board; running FreeBSD 2.2 GAMMA. (GENERIC kernel) Is there any easy way for me to verify that this is a problem in the drivers, not the drive itself or elsewhere in the SCSI hardware? And are there any easy knobs to tweak to eliminate the occasional timeout errors on long blocks? Thanks, -Pat
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