Exabyte Recap ???

[Dave Olson]

In <6755 at vax1.acs.udel.EDU> mccalpin at vax1.acs.udel.EDU (John D Mccalpin) writes:

| There was a recent discussion about the trouble using the Exabyte
| tape drive on a personal IRIS that I did not pay adequate attention to.
| 
| Questions:
| 
| (1) Is the Exabyte usable with the PI?  Can you ignore the SCSI power-on
|     diagnostics and just use it?

Yes, and yes.

| (2) Will the situation change with the release of 3.3?

No, the problem is in the firmware of the Exabyte.  They don't respond
'correctly' to commands that they don't support (correctly defined as
the way all other scsi devices I have seen do it; the standard isn't
completely clear on the subject).

Exabyte has made some firmware changes to resolve this problem; it isn't
clear when (or if) drives will be shipped by Exabyte with the new firmware.

For later model PI's, doing 'setenv bootmode C' in the prom monitor supresses
most of the SCSI diagnostics, including the one that causes problems with
the Exabyte.
--

	Dave Olson

Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.