[97969] in RedHat Linux List
Re: Seagate TR-4 Tape
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David E. Fox)
Thu Nov 5 23:44:30 1998
From: "David E. Fox" <dfox@belvdere.vip.best.com>
Reply-To: dfox@belvdere.vip.best.com
To: redhat-list@redhat.com
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 20:22:52 -0800
Cc: bobj@eskimo.com
Resent-From: redhat-list@redhat.com
On Thu, 05 Nov 1998, bob jones wrote:
>A hardware problem, so I took the box back to the !local! dealer where I
>bought it. The result? The problem is the Seagate tape drive!!! With it
>removed from the system the cdrom works just fine. With it in the system
>the cdrom won't work. I watched the tech show that conclusion, and I
>still can't believe it. The tech says that can happen with IDE
>controllers.
I *think* I had a similar problem as you did earlier in the
year. When I put this system together, I had two IDE devices, a
345 meg Maxtor hard drive and a Sony 55E 2-speed CD Rom. Later on,
I purchased a 1.6 gig Maxtor hard drive. Originally, I had the
hard drive on /dev/hda, the cd rom on /dev/hdb, and the older
drive on /dev/hdc.
For a long time this worked. Then, when I moved, I started having some
very strange problems -- like suddenly the drive wouldn't be
recognized, or I'd boot up and one of the hard drives wouldn't be
recognized, etc. I played with cables and power connectors, but
to no avail, although it looked like one of the power connectors
might have had a short in it. So, I just unplugged the CD-ROM, because
at that point no matter what I did, I couldn't get all three IDE devices
to be automatically recognized -- despite that the configuration
actually used to work! :(
Eventually, the cd-rom ended up kicking the bucket after a few
months of disuse. I found another 8x CD ROM which turned out not
to be any good :(, and then I found one that worked perfectly. What
worked for me was to put the second IDE hard drive on the primary
controller, along with the first drive, as slave /dev/hdb. Then I
put the new CDROM drive on /dev/hdc as master. That configuration
worked. Also I was able to obtain a full tower case, with good power
connectors, and this also helped a great deal to get things working
again.
Needless to say, I didn't go IDE when I got a tape drive. :)
>Now for my question. I have to get Seagate to send me a replacement
>drive. Reasoning that if one fails another might fail too, I'm tempted
I'm not sure that the tape drive is the problem. Also, the CD-ROM could
lock up the bus, so I figure perhaps that the tape drive could
conceivably cause similar problems. For instance, if you make the
CD-ROM as master and put the tape drive as slave on the first IDE
controller, or cable up things in a different configuration, you might
find that both the tape and CD ROM could work together.
However, I'm not sure it's worth the headache. Originally, I didn't
expect problems (and I'm sure you didn't either) but nevertheless, they
popped up. :(
>what SCSI controllers for the TR-4 would be compatible with RHL5.1?
>Does anyone out there have a Seagate (or HP) TR-4 SCSI drive with a
>controller that works with RHL5.1?
I use an Adaptec 2920C. It uses the aic7xxx driver, which isn't (or
doesn't exactly work right) in the stock 5.1 redhat kernel. I've
been able to get it to work by downloading 2.0.35, and the most
recent version of the AIC 7xxx driver (ftp.dialnet.net) but as I
wrote before, that kernel won't let me get into X, so what I end
up doing is to reboot off of a floppy and back up using regular
tar. Eventually (?) I plan on getting the sources for Redhat's
2.0.35, and seeing if I can apply the patch. (Otherwise if someone
has a good or better aic7xxx.o module that I can just drop in, assuming
that's possible?)
For a tape drive, I settled on an HP surestore 4mm DAT drive, which set
me back about $500. It's more expensive than the Travan drives, but the
media cost is far cheaper (I got 10 extra tapes, not including the tapes
HP supplied, for an extra 51.xx.) Travan tapes I think go for $20-30 a
piece.
>bob jones (bobj@eskimo.com)
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
David E. Fox Tax Thanks for letting me
dfox@belvdere.vip.best.com the change magnetic patterns
root@belvedere.sbay.org churches on your hard disk.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
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