Sorry it's taken so long, but we've had other problems in resolving this stuff.
I decided to take an unused SCSI card out of a similar Alphastation, in order
to make sure that it was supported and all. But the key for the case had gone
missing, and when I got a master key from DEC, the lock turned out to be stuck
in a major way.
So we logged a service call and got our support rep to remove the old lock.
Once I got the SCSI card out, it was short work to add it to the tape station
and recompile the kernel. Everything seems to be fine now. I had initially
dismissed the SCSI length claims since it seemed obvious that the length was
under 3m. Now, however, I'm wondering if one of the tape drives has an
inordinate amount of internal wiring.
Thanks to everyone who responded:
Blake Roberts <BlaRob_at_HBSI.COM>
aoki_at_CS.Berkeley.EDU (Paul M. Aoki)
tsh_at_mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk (T. S. Horsnell)
Jim Belonis <belonis_at_dirac.phys.washington.edu>
Brian Harvey <brian.harvey_at_ustsvs.com>
"Thomas Strandenaes" <thomas.strandenaes_at_adm.uit.no>
Arno Hahma <arno_at_nitro.pp.utu.fi>
maurerf_at_post.ch
Wesley Darlington <wesley_at_yelsew.com>
Joe Fletcher <joe_at_meng.ucl.ac.uk>
Peter Reynolds <PReynolds_at_synstar.com>
alan_at_nabeth.cxo.dec.com (Alan Rollow)
Original message below:
On Thu, 11 Mar 1999 14:40:45 CST Dan Bongert wrote:
> We have an Alphastation 200 that is being used by our users to
> transfer data from old tapes to new ones. To facilitate this, we have
> 4 SCSI tape drives attached (4mm, 8mm, 3480, and 9 track), as well as
> the internal HD and CD-ROM. We needed to add swap space, and tried to
> add an external hard drive to serve as swap and a larger /tmp.
>
> Anyway, in addition to some system wierdness with the 8mm drive
> before the new drive was installed (tapes wouldn't be able to be
> recovered from), now the system won't boot. It boots fine with just
> the new HD, and with just the new HD and one other device. If we add
> any more than that, somewhere the startup (not always in the same
> place), we get bombarded with scsi cam errors.
>
> I am wondering if splitting the devices between two SCSI busses would
> help? This would involve buying another PCI scsi card, in which case
> I have another question: Can I stick a "regular" PCI SCSI adapter in
> there? Or are the PCI slots somehow non-standard?
Dan Bongert dbongert_at_ssc.wisc.edu
SSCC Unix System Administrator (608) 262-9857
Received on Thu Mar 25 1999 - 17:40:44 NZST