Apollos and tape drives...

For the archives, as this might save someone else a lot of messing around one day :-) Was struggling to get a 400t to install from tape as it'd always die with "(open_input_volume) Unable to open volume. (unrecognized error status 28000B)" after doing a tape retension when loading from the boot tape. It was driving me nuts as I'd tested the drive and media elsewhere and it was fine, plus it was reading CALENDAR / INVOL / DOMAIN_OS from the boot tape fine. I spent a long time messing around with SCSI cabling, double and triple checking devices ID's etc. As a last resort I tried my 150MB SCSI tape drive - I've known it to be a little flakey with reads sometimes, but I just wanted to see if behaviour was different. Guess what - it's worked fine! The 150MB drive is a little newer than my 60MB one. All I can think of is that the 60MB drive takes a little too long to become ready again after the retension for the Apollo's liking, and it times out. Maybe it'd be fine on a slower machine (DN3000 / DN3500 say) but it isn't up to the job on a 400 series system. Anyway, maybe this'll save someone a bit of pain one day (it takes around 15 minutes each to run invol and calendar from tape and well over 30 for domain_os, so it's rather a slow process to keep on having to do! - I've probably run through it ten times in the last 2 days trying to figure out what was going on) cheers Jules