anderson@sapir.cog.jhu.edu (Stephen R. Anderson) (02/14/91)
I'd like to be able to back up my cube. Since it's an old one, I don't have a floppy drive (yet; not that I want to backup 600 Mbytes to floppies!), and I can't get any OD's (at least not at prices that are appropriate for backup media). However, I have a TEAC 155N SCSI tape drive, originally bought for a Mac. These are relatively small, fast, convenient, low-cost tape drives that provide 150 Mbytes capacity on media the size of a standard audio cassette. This was such a good backup device for the Mac that I actually used to do backups.....:-) All of the Mac backup programs support this drive, and an excellent device driver for A/UX was made available by an independent developer (Tony Cooper). I tried to use this drive under OS1.0, with no luck: when it was present on the SCSI bus, it would crash the boot process, and it was never correctly recognized. Oh well, I thought. Maybe things will get better under 2.0. And they did, but not enough better. Under 2.0, the drive is correctly recognized at startup and assigned as st0. I can then do "mt -f /dev/rst0 rewind" without generating an error; "mt -f /dev/rst0 eof" causes the drive select light to go, the dirve churns a little, and again I get no error (though I don't know how to verify whether or not it actually wrote an eof). But when I try to actually write something to the drive (with e.g. "tar -cvf /dev/rst0 ./*.c") the drive select light does not go on; tar lists the first couple of files and then exits with the message "drive write error". Ideally, someone will have actually installed one of these drives on a NeXT and can tell me precisely what to do to get it to work. Failing that, perhaps someone with more general experience with tape utilities and drivers can give me some hints, or at least tell me what else to look for. Unfortunately, these things are sold on a very much plug-and-play basis for Macs, so I didn't get any useful documentation when I bought the drive. I don't know, for instance, what its opinions may be as to preferred blocking factors. My impression is that the range of available backup options for the NeXT is rather limited at present. The TEAC drive is an attractive one, if it can be made to work. Thanks in advance for any help, Steve Anderson