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From: Ron Warnick <ron@3rivers.net>
Message-Id: <199603121907.MAA06741@warnick.usa.net>
Subject: Re: floppy tapes
To: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au (Michael Smith)
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 1996 12:07:49 -0700 (MST)
Cc: questions@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <199603112221.IAA23536@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> from Michael Smith at "Mar 12, 96 08:51:55 am"
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> Dan Benjamin stands accused of saying:
> > 
> > I have read the FAQ and Handbook, and was wondering, specifically, if 
> > there are certain brands or types of floppy tape drives that do or don't 
> > work with FreeBSD 2.1-RELEASE.
> 
> Floppy tapes don't work, period.  It's possibly to cajole them into
> sort-of working, but due to their hopeless design, it's impossible to 
> communicate with them in a fashion consistent with a 'real' operating system.
> 
> If you want the grisly details, I'm happy to spell them out, but in short,
> don't buy one, don't advise anyone else to buy one, and don't try using
> one if you have it 8)
> 
> Buy a cheap SCSI card (eg. Adaptec 1520) and get a SCSI tape.  You will
> _never_ regret it.
> 
> > |  Dan Benjamin              dan@init.org  |
> 

I have a conner 250 MB on a floppy controller that worked (unreliably) 
with 2.1R. It would often die in the middle of a large backup, but always worked 
with small ones, using ft. With -current of Mar 6, any use of ft or mt 
immediatly locked the machine, no cores... no nothing. With -current, Mar 10,
I get intermittent lockups or reboots, still no cores or messages. I was hoping 
that maybe the VM_ fixes would help, and will try again. But I'm not expecting
too much of the conner.

Ron