stevem@pserv.CFSMO.Honeywell.COM (Steve Mestad) (05/03/90)
We have an SI 9625 dual ported tape drive with Aviv controllers on a Microvax II. We are experiencing problems when using cpio on multi tape archives. Cpio will prompt for the tapes on write and everything seems to be working ok. But when reading the archive, cpio goes out of phase when it starts to read the second tape. (For much of our tape work, cpio is the only utility that meets our needs. Tar, dump, and the others dont have the necessary capabilities.) EOT seems to be handled properly for tar and dd. Dec says cpio handles multiple tape archives just fine on their tape drives. (SI's tape drive is supposed to emulate a TS11 drive.) SI has checked into things and even tried converting the drive to use a QS1000 controller (which emulates TK50 and also didnt work properly.) So far no progress in resolving the problem. My questions are: Does cpio work properly on Dec drives? If so, which ones? Is anyone else out there using the SI tape drive? Is cpio working for you? If so, how are you making it work? (Piping cpio through dd had a dramatic unacceptable decrease in performance when we tried it. It also seems to drop a bit of data at the end of the archive.) Any suggestions of where to go from here? Thanks. Steve Mestad stevem%pserv@src.honeywell.com
grr@cbmvax.commodore.com (George Robbins) (05/04/90)
In article <8@pserv.CFSMO.Honeywell.COM> stevem%pserv@src.honeywell.com writes: > We have an SI 9625 dual ported tape drive with Aviv controllers on a > Microvax II. We are experiencing problems when using cpio on multi > tape archives. Cpio will prompt for the tapes on write and everything > seems to be working ok. But when reading the archive, cpio goes out of > phase when it starts to read the second tape... ... > Any suggestions of where to go from here? Well, I'd actually try it on a DEC drive and see if you get the same results. If not, then dump the end of the first tape and the beginning of the second tape and see how they differ. One possibility would be that the SI drive isn't successfully doing a backspace & write eof or whatever trick DEC is using to indicate end of tape. Another possibility would be to look at the portable archive (pax) utility that Usenix has developed. It handles both cpio and tar formats, and is available in source form from various archives. -- George Robbins - now working for, uucp: {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!grr but no way officially representing: domain: grr@cbmvax.commodore.com Commodore, Engineering Department phone: 215-431-9349 (only by moonlite)