[ale] SCSI Travan Tape Drive I/O Error

[Jeff]

Under Mandrake 7.0-2 with Gnome/Enlightenment, I've got a Seagate Hornet
20GB (Traval) SCSI tape drive sitting along with a Ricoh CD-RW drive on
an SIIG AP-10 Fast (narrow) SCSI card.  This card has auto termination.
The CD-RW drive is unterminated and has SCSI ID 0.  The tape drive is at
the end of the cable and has its termination power and its termination
enabled via jumper.  Parity checking is turned off via jumper and is
likewise disabled in the SCSI card's BIOS.

Here is the kind of exchange I get when I try something like backing up
my /boot partition to tape:

     # tar -cvf /dev/st0 /boot
     tar: Removing leading `/' from archive names
     boot/
     boot/lost+found/
     boot/boot.b
     boot/chain.b
     boot/os2_d.b
     boot/System.map-2.2.14-15mdk
     tar: Cannot write to /dev/st0: Input/output error
     tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

Now, the command

     mt -f /dev/st0 retension

works, but

     mt -f /dev/st0 datcompress

(which is supposed to return the compression flag status of the drive)
gives me

     /dev/st0: Can't read SCSI mode page.
     /dev/st0: Can't read compression mode page.

So, the tape drive isn't completely dead - just wounded.  FWIW, the
CD-RW drive works normally, at least in read (I haven't tried write).

Can any of you tell, from the kind of error I'm getting when I use tar,
at least what class of problem I'm looking at?  It's really important
that I get this tape drive working because I want to save this machine's
state so I can revert back to it when I bollocks the system up
completely.

- Jeff






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