Re: detecting SCSI tape drive
Paul,
Thanks for the quick reply and the helpful suggestions.
> Do you have st as a module, or compiled into the kernel?
I had it compiled into the kernel.
> If you use the module, take st out of /etc/modules, and try loading it
> at a later stage (I have it auto-loading). Maybe with/without a tape
> present makes a difference? Is the tape drive external? Is all
> termination as it should be? I.e. all the usual SCSI questions; SCSI
> support on alpha's is nothing special (It Just Works), so don't
> concentrate on the fact this happens to be an alpha. Sometimes that can
> be the cause of the problem, here I very much doubt it...
The drive in an internal, and termination looks ok.
Following your suggestions, I put a tape into the drive and booted (kernel
with driver compiled in) and it booted fine. Then recompiled the kernel
with st as a module, /etc/modules set to auto. Booted without a tape in
the drive and it hung at the same point as before, right after detecting
the hard disk. After putting a tape in the drive and rebooting it detects
the drive properly, boots up, and loads the module on demand.
So it works, provided there is a tape in the drive on boot. My question at
this point is whether this is related to the driver for the controller
(qlogicisp). The doc for it says:
"This driver works well in practice, but does not support disconnect/
reconnect, which makes using it with tape drives impractical."
Not sure how to interpret this since the tape drive does work, the only
issue seems to be booting from the hard disk without a tape in the drive
(perhaps that is the impractical part.)
Since the machine boots fine from the floopy disk (root=/dev/sda2) is
there any difference in the boot code (on the floppy vs bootlx on the
hard disk) that loads the kernel? If it is a driver issue, then perhaps a
request could be filed with the developer for inclusion in a future
release?
Again, thanks for the help.
Ernest Johanson
Web Systems Administrator
Fuller Theological Seminary
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