Re: detecting SCSI tape drive
On Thu 27 Jan 2000, Ernest Johanson wrote:
> 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.)
Well, if the controller (or in this case apparently the driver) doesn't
support disconnect, you'll have problems when writing to or reading from
the tape; whenever a tape operation is ongoing, no access to the rest of
the SCSI bus will be possible. Which is a bummer if that's where your
filesystems are.
> 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
Apparently the one that probes the tape streamer is the problem...
> request could be filed with the developer for inclusion in a future
> release?
You could try an alternative driver... I found one at
www.feral.com/isp.html that I'm currently using for my ISP1040.
I got a better impression from that one than from the one in the
standard kernel (nothing concrete, just a feeling).
Paul Slootman
--
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