jaz@uunet.uu.net (Jack A. Zucker) (12/13/89)
I recently bought a Sparcstation 1. I am using an Archive Viper 150 (2150s) tape drive, as well as a Micropolis hard disk. The tape drive works fine from Unix doing tar creates and extracts to and from the tape. I've also used the drive to install other commercial software without any problems. However, during suninstall for release 4.03c, I get the following message: st0: Request sense couldn't sense data. This error occurs during the software information menu on suninstall. Up until this point, the tape reads fine. The media itself is good, as I can tar any of the files off the tape by forward spacing to the appropriate file and extracting from the tape. When I called sun about this, they refused to support me because the tape drive was not a Sun tape unit. (Even though sun uses the archive viper 150, and it's listed on the man page for "st"). BTW - The tape is set up as SCSI ID 4 (st0), the disk is set up as SCSI ID 0 (sd3). The logical to physical address mapping is apparently translated by an editable parameter in eeprom. I could remap SCSI ID 0 to sd0 but I figure that Sun set it up this way for some purpose. Yes, the bus is terminated, etc. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, the sun tapes are in QIC 24 format. I'm wondering if there is a time-out parameter I can increase in the device driver... I don't want to encounter this problem the next time I install some software from SUN. Thanks in advance. Jack A. Zucker jaz@calvin.icd.ab.com