Re: RamFAST Rev. C and Archive Viper 150?

[gtolar@blkbox.com (Glynne Tolar)]

John D. Baker (jdb8042@blkbox.COM) wrote:

: Some things I forgot to mention in my previous post:

: My SCSI chain is as follows:

:      RamFAST--->DEC RZ23----->[PTTB]-->Viper 150
:              ^            ^          ^
:            15 in.        6 ft.      10 in.

: "[PTTB]" is a Mac-style <spit> pass-through terminator block.  There
: are no other terminators installed on any devices ('cept the RF, of course).

What kind of cabling are you using (ribben, 50-50 cintronics, etc.)?  
Some on GEnie have reported the cheap cables sometimes skimp on wiring 
and don't work quite right on some drives.  If you can move the cabling 
around.  I know, I'm stabing in the dark here but at this point I'm not 
sure what the cause of this is.  Are you using the same power supply that 
the drive came with?  Some tape drives are power haugs and need good 
power supplied.

: I thoroughly cleaned the tape-drive's head prior to using it.

: Just out of curiousity, what SHOULD I see in SCSI utils when looking at
: the Viper drive?  It always says the device is "0K" with "0K" available
: regardless of what I've done with it.

That is not unsusal to see 0k available as that type of drive has no idea 
how much space it has.  It just runs till it runs out of space, basically.

: During some of my attempts, the drive would suddenly come to a stop and
: the backup would keep going (although it would start racking errors).

: I finally managed to get it to back up with 0 errors logged, but I never
: see anything when I look at the drive with "ScsiUtils" in the RamFAST
: utility.

And in your next post...

: Ooops!  in addition to other things I forgot, the version of the
: RamFAST ROM is:
:
:     v3.01b

I think I was running 2.0something when I use one of these drives.  The 
3.00 (somewhere between a and h, I think) had some problems with tape 
drives.  Had to do with strange SCSI handshaking.  So I think your ROM is 
fine.

I was hoping to see something in your post that made me say "Ah-ha!" but 
so far I ain't got a clue.