[ale] [Somewhat OT] Troubleshooting help request w/ external tape drive

[Christopher Woodfield]

Hello,

I bought an external DDS4 tape drive off of eBay last week, which I  
plan to use with my Mac desktop machine and Retrospect 6.0 backup  
software. Right off the bat, things aren't working correctly - the  
tape drive's "Clean" LED comes on after only a few hours of use, the  
drive makes some odd wind/rewind noises during the write phase, and  
I'm unable to successfully restore anything that gets written to  
tape. Retrospect's "verify" run hangs, as if it's trying over and  
over again to read data and failing.

The drive is a Seagate STD6401LW drive, with a 68-pin Ultra2 SCSI  
external interface.

What I'd like to be able to do is use the drive with a different  
system, to verify that the problem is the drive, and not any of the  
other components (cable, terminator, SCSI adapter, software, etc). I  
have a PC available that I can put either Windows or Linux onto for  
this purpose, but I can't justify buying another SCSI adapter, cable,  
and terminator just for one test.

Does anyone have a spare SCSI adapter, cable and terminator that I  
could borrow for this test? I'm in Midtown, but can certainly venture  
OTP to pick up.

Thanks in advance,

-Chris Woodfield