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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.bugs Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!think.com!cass.ma02.bull.com!melb.bull.oz.au!sjg From: sjg@melb.bull.oz.au (Simon J Gerraty) Subject: New SCSI does not read last blocks on tape: aha1542b, Archive Viper 150 Message-ID: <1993May15.074104.12425@melb.bull.oz.au> Organization: Bull HN Information Systems Australia Date: Sat, 15 May 1993 07:41:04 GMT Lines: 62 I posted some time ago about problems with "soft errors" with an aha1542b driving my old 60Mb Archive tape drive using Julian's SCSI drivers. I received a patch from one source which basically replicated my own efforts, which experimentation had shown did not solve the problem. The basic problem is (I'd guess) that the drive is reporting a partial write, but either it doesn't say or the driver does not take note of how much data was written. The only other suggestion I received was to get a newer tape drive. Well, I've been testing it today with an Archive 150Mb "Viper" drive: May 15 10:34:51 zen /386bsd: dev5,lu0: type \ 0:1(sequential),removable 'ARCHIVE VIPER 150 21822-001' scsi1 May 15 10:34:51 zen /386bsd: st1: scsi tape drive, 0 blocks \ of 512 bytes Using this drive and a stock scsi driver setup (as per patchkit 0.2.3) I get none of the "soft error" messages, my applications read/write happily - BUT I still lose data. dd bs=8k < usr.src.cpio > /dev/rst1 dd bs=8k < /dev/rst1 > /tmp/tape.data -rw-rw-r-- 1 root wheel 42415616 Apr 6 20:23 \ /l0/tmp/usr.src.cpio -rw-rw-r-- 1 root wheel 42409984 May 15 16:28 \ /tmp/tape.data That's 5632 bytes (11 * 512 tape blocks) short. tail /tmp/tape.data | cat -vt shows that we are definitely short of useful data (about half way through sys.386bsd/sys/socketvar.h last file in the archive apart from a symlink) This is 300% better than the result I get with the older 60Mb drive which typically hits a write error at about 11Mb. The 60Mb drive was able to read all my old dump and cpio archives ok except that it always failed to return the last few blocks of data - as is the case above with the 150Mb drive. Has anybody else seen a similar problem? Anyone tried restoring from their backups? Has anyone patched st.c to cater for QIC24 drives? I would like to still be able to write 60Mb tapes, even if I buy a 150/250 Mb drive. BTW, thanks to all who responded to my post about keyboard hangs, the patch (from chmr@edvz.tu-graz.ac.at) worked nicely. Unfortunately I was chasing hardware faults due to some info supplied to a friend running the same hardware... -- Simon J. Gerraty <sjg@zen.void.oz.au> (home) #include <disclaimer> /* imagine something *very* witty here */