SCO Unix and Archive tape drives.

[Bill Campbell]

In <2162 at starfish.Convergent.COM> dick at starfish.Convergent.COM (Dick Hacking) writes:

:In <1991May21.063625.20549 at viscar.uucp> gph at viscar.uucp (Gerard Hickey) writes:

:>I recently bought an Archive 2060 tape drive, and I have been having major
:>problems trying to make it work. Does anyone out there have the beast working
:>with SCO UNIX 3.2?

:>I got the device driver for the tape drive installed fine, but everytime I
:>access the drive, it causes my kernel to panic!!! 

:I have not seen a kernel panic, but we had a lot of
:difficulties with Archive tape drives in all platforms when
:the firmware on the drive was not up to the latest revision
:level. If the firmware in your drive is 21247-005 or less
:GET IT UPDATED. I consider -006 the minimum acceptable
:revision for *any* OS and we (Unisys) are currently shipping
:-011 firmware.

:Dick.

I have used the Archive ``FasTape'' and ``Viper'' drives on
several SCO systems without any problems by setting the IRQ at 2
and declaring it to be 25 in ``mkdev tape''.  The Appropriate
responses to the prompts in ``mkdev tape'' are 1, 1, 25, 0200H.

I don't really understand the `logic' of Intel bus IRQs, but this
works fine where I've tried it.

Most of our systems are using Archive 150MB SCSI tapes
eliminating this problem entirely (except I had a bit of a bother
figuring out that I had to delete a tape and declare the scsi as
the default tape before I could use it under SCO UNIX 3.2v2).

Bill
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