Summary: trying to back up on DC600A tapes

From: Brendan Kehoe (brendan@cs.widener.edu)
Date: Tue Mar 05 1991 - 11:47:11 CST


 My original question:

  Anybody have a quick 'n easy fix for this? I have a 150Mb drive,
but I use DC600A tapes (the dept head said it'd be better to back up a
140Mb filesystem on 3 60Mb tapes than get one 150Mb tape. Don't ask
me.). Anyway, I've always done my backups with 'em just fine. But now
with 4.1.1, it complains that it's not a 6150 tape. Does it have
something to do with the system recognizing it as an Archive QIC-150
drive now? (In the past it didn't have a label.)

 The answer: a resounding NO, use 6150's.

 Turns out Sun made their driver more intelligent (oo great) under
4.1.1 and it senses the type of tape you're using and refuses it,
rather than just print a syslog message about it.

 So I've ordered a few 6150 tapes to tide me over til the new budget
comes & I can order the number I need for a real regimented backup
schedule (anybody need some DC600A's? hehe). Hopefully in the next
week or so the disks won't cough. (Knock on redwood.)

 Oh, a few people mentioned that you can squeeze up to 125 Mb on a
DC600A tape on an Archive-150 cuz it writes it in QIC-120 format,
which is the same as QIC-150, but with 15 tracks instead of 18. (But
QIC-24 (60Mb) tape drives can't read this.)

 Woe for a source license! Mebbe hacking on the driver from 4.1 to
work in the kernel in 4.1.1 would work? Just create a new tape device?
Hmm.

 Anyway, thanks to everybody that responded (I hope I got 'em all):

        From: dan@breeze.bellcore.com (Daniel Strick)
        From: rick@wiau.medical-biophysics.manchester.ac.uk
        From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
        From: bit!markm (Mark Morrissey)
        From: Aydin Edguer <edguer@alpha.ces.cwru.edu>
        From: tessi!joey@nosun.West.Sun.COM (Joe Pruett)
        From: jan@eik.ii.uib.no
        From: eastend!steve@uu.psi.com (Steven Roth)
        From: jaysun@cs.clemson.edu (Jay Williamson - System Manager)
        From: randy@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov (Rand S. Huntzinger)
        From: Scott Parrish <pacengr!smp@sacto.West.Sun.COM>
        From: tilman@indetech.com (Tilman Sporkert x2049)
        From: del@mlb.semi.harris.com (Don Lewis)

--
     Brendan Kehoe - Widener Sun Network Manager - brendan@cs.widener.edu
  Widener University in Chester, PA                A Bloody Sun-Dec War Zone



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:06:11 CDT