tape drive woes

["Ronald D. Anderson", IBD]

ajp2o at crocus.medicine.rochester.edu (Anthony J. Persechini) writes:

| O.K. I looked in the system administrator's guide under "disk and cartridge
| tape devices" and find no discussion of cartridge tape devices. So
| perhaps some kind soul can give me a hand. I recently installed
| a new WREN 380 meg disk, which seemed to want to be in the
| bottom slot of my 4D20G (under 3.3.1). This necessitated moving the tape drive
| to the upper one. I now cannot figure out how to get it working. 
| It appears that the machine cannot find it; shouldn't it
| have found it automatically on boot up? Perhaps the problem
| is the way the tape drive is jumpered. Any suggestions, especially
| from those who have dealt with this problem would be
| appreciated greatly.

when the field engineer put our scsi tape drive in the top slot, he had to
file down the button that defines the drive number (a small plastic finger
on the rear upper part of the tape drive chassis).  seems that the tower
chassis doesn't have quite enough room for the drive to be pushed in, and
this little finger gets squeezed during the process.  since this button
is a two-position (?) switch for defining the tape address, once it gets
set to the wrong mode then the tape drive is unrecognizable to the sgi o/s.
try removing the drive to see whether this address switch is still in the
original mode as when you inserted it into the tower.

						-andy at brl
					(no long descriptive narrative)