jmcook@cbnewsm.ATT.COM (Joel M. Cook) (07/10/89)
I have a Wangtek streaming tape controller and the appropriate 60MB drive. This combination works quite nicely under UNIX on my 6386WGS. I wanted to change from a 30 MB hard disk on my 6300 (ROMBIOS 1.43, MSDOS 3.3) to a 20 MB. The 30MB disk is RLL and the 20MB is ST506. To do this, I thought to install the streaming tape unit on the 6300, back up the 18 or so MB on the disk, change the disks, and put the contents back onto the 20MB disk. I installed the STU,after some playing around with interrupts and DMA stuff, and it seemed to work fine as evidenced by the successful installation and checkout with the diagnostics diskette. However, when I do a complete backup, the tape writes until it reaches the end (long before 15MB have been transferred), and then gives me an "unrecoverable write error" and stops. If anyone knows why this is so, I'd appreciate being told. SInce it's a 60MB tape, this seems to be unreasonable behavior. More importantly, if anyone knows how to fix the problem, I'd be even MORE appreciative. I don't know if it's a fundamental problem with using this STU in a 6300, a problem trying to back up an RLL disk, or just brain-damaged software! Thanks in advance for any help. Joel Cook