RE: detecting SCSI tape drive
Hi -
I had similar problems a while ago with our alpha and a DEC tape drive. I
could not get it working reliably enough to use on our machine which we use
as a file server (and backup device), so I swapped to a new ethernet card.
Apparently, the qlogic driver _does_ support disconnect/reconnect according
to Matthew Jacob who wrote the new combined qlogic driver (although this is
from memory so sorry if I'm wrong). It may be worth trying his driver
instead as it definately made a difference on our alpha box - see
http://www.feral.com Its been in the Free/Net/OpenBSD releases for quite a
while. Unfortunately we'd already bought the new card so I couldnt say for
definite it fixed our tape/scsi problems.
> 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.)
>
Marcus
-- Marcus Williams @ work - Quintic Ltd, Cambridge, UK
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