Reading 9-track tapes in Linux

On Sun, 2005-07-03 at 12:57 -0700, Vintage Computer Festival wrote: Umm, that's plain wrong. SCSI's just a single bus which needs to be terminated at each end, nowhere inbetween. The controller can be anywhere physically on the bus so long as termination rules are observed. It really is that simple. Sounds like what you have is something where one end of the bus is terminated *before* the last device (the tape drive). That *might* just work (often with the odd data error during use) on a short cable or at a low speed, but it's still wrong. Not sure what controller you're using, but you might need to drop the transfer rate in the BIOS too for that particular device if it's a bit old and clunky. I've never worked out why people think SCSI's so complex - it's always seemed easy to me; the only hassle is tracing oddball data faults when running close to the limit of performance and with a fully loaded bus. Does the drive not have termination built-in that's activated by a jumper? That's reasonably common, even on really old drives. Worst case, grab any old SCSI disk that can also do termination and put *that* at the end of the bus 'past' the tape drive; power it from an old PC PSU or something. (as someone else has suggested) it's easy :) Seriously, I've always had more trouble with IDE setups than I have with SCSI (usually because the drives / cables / controllers tend to be cheap crap) have fun! Jules