Return to BSD News archive
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!quagga.ru.ac.za!ucthpx!ticsa.com!orion.didata.co.za!swhite From: swhite@orion.didata.co.za (Sean White) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Exabyte tape drive Date: 18 Dec 1994 20:33:46 GMT Organization: The Internetworking Company of Southern Africa Lines: 41 Message-ID: <3d26ba$5ej@ticsa.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: orion.didata.co.za X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] I wonder if anybody can help me with a problem that I'm having. My system is a 486DX/50 EISA/VLB with 16MB Ram. I have an Adaptec 1742A controller driving a Conner 1.05Gb drive (internal) and a Sony CD-ROM drive (external) on a permanent basis and occasionally a Wangtek QIC drive gets attached to the SCSI bus as well. All of this works very well under FreeBSD 1.1.5.1R and I'm fairly happy. My problem started when I had to make a full backup of the 1.05Gb drive (my first!) and so I swiped an Exabyte drive off our RS/6000 to make life easier. Okay, the drive has an IBM badge on it but that shouldn't matter - my Sony CD-ROM drive has a Sun badge! Anyway, I checked the notes on FreeBSD and it said that it supported all SCSI tape drives so I slapped the Exabyte on the bus after powering down the system, powered up the peripherals in sequence and was overjoyed to see the Adaptec recognise the Exabyte for what it was. Even FreeBSD's probe saw it. 'Yay', I thought. Let's do some 'tar'ring here. That's when the roof fell in. The system would not write to the drive. It came up with an error saying that "st0: oops not queued". Nothing that I tried would make this drive/system work for me. I gave up after an hour and did the backup on plenty of DC-6000 tapes in the QIC drive. A slightly related problem here - I created the backup using 'tar -cvPpMl' for each of the partitions on my disk. / and /home each went on a single tape but /usr took three. The creating went smoothly - restoring /usr later proved to be problematic in that the tape changes wouldn't work. 'tar' reported that the second tape was 'out of sequence'. Anyway, is there something stupid that I was doing in coupling up the Exabyte drive? Does FreeBSD support Exabyte drives or do I have to re-compile something to make it work? Is 'tar' broken when it comes to handling multi- volume backups? Sorry for the long post but this one really had me baffled. I tell you, it was a great evening... start backups at 18:00, get home at 01:48 next morning... Any advice would really be appreciated. - Sean.