[comp.sys.mac.hardware] Problems with Retrospect 1.3 and Teac Tape Drive

ace@tidbits.UUCP (Adam C. Engst) (06/09/91)

Hi All,
  I'm having some trouble with Retrospect 1.3 and a Teac 150 MB
tape drive on an SE/30 with no internal hard drive. We just got
it to replace a SyQuest drive as primary backup media and want
to switch over the network backup (four hard drives mounted over
TOPS under 6.0.x) to it while retaining the SyQuest drive for
other work. Originally we had it set up theoretically
incorrectly with the internally terminated Dataframe 1st in the
SCSI chain, the internally terminated SyQuest second, and the
externally terminated Teac third. It worked, or seemed to work,
but gave a communications error after backing up about 11 MB.
Switching the SCSI chain to put the now-unterminated Teac in the
middle of the chain eliminated that problem, but now Retrospect
is failing with strange errors like "No Media Present" while 100
files into the backup. The tape is obviously present and
apparently operating fine, but we keep getting these problems
after a while into the backup. Needless to say, it's not the
same place each time. Agggh! Of course this happening on the
weekend, so I'll be calling Dantz Monday, but I thought it was
worth asking here first. Any idea what might be wrong? I've had little
experience with tape drives before this, which is why I'm unsure what
might be happening.

PS: Please respond via email, since I'm not able to keep up with these
groups. Thanks!

Thanks for any input!   Adam Engst

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Adam C. Engst    Editor of TidBITS, the weekly electronic Macintosh journal

ace@tidbits.uucp                         The best way to predict the future
pv9y@crnlvax5, pv9y@vax5.cit.cornell.edu       is to invent it.   -Alan Kay