This week our external DLT tape drive started exhibiting intermittent
faults. Compaq support have been diligently trying to solve the problem,
but so far it has resisted logic. I thought I would try this list in case
someone else had seen something similar.
The fault appeared immediately after the AS4100 was upgraded by the
addition of a CPU, more memory, a disc and a power supply. We suspected
some kind of physical disruption or a consequence of the power-off, but
this could be a red herring.
The tape drive will work for a while: typically a few minutes, but once it
managed 40 minutes. But then it gets a time-out error.
We have tried replacing the tape drive, the cable and the SCSI interface
card but we still get the problem. We tried moving the tape drive to a
different machine and it showed no problems there. The engineer is running
out of things to swap! We tried moving to a different PCI bus, but
although the console saw the tape drive the kernel did not (no isp1
messages in the startup messages).
We are running 4.0E patch kit 3. I have patch kit 4 on site, though it
seems unlikely it would help.
The engineer's next plan is to try removing the CPU and memory in case
that affects it in some bizarre way.
If anyone has wasted a week of their life tearing their hair out over a
similar problem I would be extremely pleased to hear from them.
Regards,
Bob
==============================================================
Bob Vickers R.Vickers_at_dcs.rhbnc.ac.uk
Dept of Computer Science, Royal Holloway, University of London
WWW:
http://www.cs.rhbnc.ac.uk/home/bobv
Phone: +44 1784 443691
Received on Fri Mar 31 2000 - 09:46:32 NZST