On Fri, 4 Feb 2005, James D. Freels wrote:
> When you say "cabling" issues, does this include a separate scsi card
> specific for the
> tape drive ?  I think my cable connections are good.

The cable may be too long, or not properly terminated.

> The scsi card I have is a "LSI Logic / Symbios Logic (formerly NCR)
> 53c875 (rev 04)"
> All devices are indicating on boot up (dmesg) at 40 MB/s except the
> CD-Rom which 
> is indicating 10 MB/s.  I have 3 hard drives, 2 tape drives (including
> the new one
> having trouble), and 1 CD-Rom in this scsi chain.  I have tried all
> three scsi drivers 
> available for this card in the linux kernel 1) ncr53c8xx, 2) sym53c8xx,
> and 3) sym53c8xx-2.
> The ncr53c8xx driver seems to give the least problems, so I have
> concentrated on
> this one.  As I said, the "library" (autoloader) seems to work

The ncr53c8xx driver is the very old one, sym53c8xx-2 is the new one. Actually
I've used all 3 of them with a 53c875 on a Linux/PPC box. sym53c8xx-2 (the
preferred one) should work fine.

> correctly, but it
> is just the tape writing that is giving me problems at present.  It is
> able to label the tapes,
> but not write a larger data set to the tape.

Is the tape drive the last device on the cable?
You already have 6 devices (7 incl. the SCSI adapter), so the cable cannot be
that long. How long is it?

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                                                Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert AT linux-m68k 
DOT org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                                            -- Linus Torvalds