On 2004-11-03, Gaétan Martineau <gmarti@pasdespammediom.qc.ca> wrote:

> Case of a 8505 exabyte drive working well under RH9 and not anymore
> under Suse 9.1.

Did you change any cabling? Add or remove devices from the chain? Change
SCSI-IDs?

> My 8505S exabyte tape drive functions (intermittently?) under a fresh
> Suse 9.1 installation. Upon the fresh install, I could restore my data
> files and so. But then, oh-oh, I could not read nor write after another
> reboot. And then I could do it... sometimes!
>
> As we can read at :
>
> http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-l...-Oct/1462.html
> http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-l...-Oct/1470.html
>
> ...people tends to think this kind of trouble is related to bad cabling
> and/or terminators, which may be the culprit.
>
> I have no terminator on my chain; the drive is the last and only device.
> But I can see that such a terminator is some 70$ or so. I am not very
> inclined to invest that much without being sure it would solve the trouble.

$70 for a terminator? The EXB-8505 is just a regular 50-pin device, and
looking at the product manual
(http://www.mwtss.com/Reference%20Lib...yte%208505.pdf)
appears to use resistor packs for termination. Check that these are
in place, and if you have any other devices on the same cable, make sure
they come before the tape drive and are not themselves terminated.

If the tape drive doesn't have the terminators, put another deive after it
on the cable and ternminate that device. Or add a simple passive
terminator to the cable.

--

-John (john@os2.dhs.org)