3 Jul
2005
3 Jul
'05
1:16 p.m.
On 7/3/05, Vintage Computer Festival <vcf at siconic.com> wrote:
I tell ya, I can understand that complicated shit will
take time, but when
something that should be easy gives me more grief than the most difficult
things I've ever worked on, it makes you wonder.
Well... termination and cable issues aside, I don't have any obvious
things to recommend. I know that in my case, I got a DEC TSZ07,
pulled out an Adaptec 1640 PCMCIA SCSI card, plugged it all together
and was instantly dumping tapes onto my RH9 laptop.
I think others have suggested some good things - test the SCSI chain
with a hard disk, then add the tape drive. Perhaps try a different
external cable. I've had those go bad on me every once in a long
while.
If you can get bits at all, it's no longer a pass/fail problem - it's
one of those harder-to-track down problems upon which some wierd
variable (phase of the moon, etc) is influencing. Not talking at all
is much easier to solve.
SCSI voodoo... remember, it _used to_ be hard to get some things
working. Tape drives never got the same attention as disk drives, and
it's less unexpected to fall into a pit trying something new.
-ethan