help installing Sun 8mm unipack scsi tape drive

Applications Filesystems, Disks and Memory
1

Hi all, please help I am stuck.

I have installed a external unipack scsi tape drive. The tape drive is Exabyte Eliant 820. All I did was connected scsi cable and power it on. When issued "probe-scsi-all" command, the tape is correctly identified. However, when issued "dmesg | more" command, the tape is not found.

Whatever backup commands I issued such as mt, tar, or ufsdump, I would just get "/dev/rmt/0n no device or address" message.

Here are questions hoping you can help out:

  1. do I need to do any configuration to prepare tape drive for use? such as mounting?

  2. what other methods can I use to verify that the tape drive is recognized by O/S and ready to be used.

my system info:
Sun Ultra 5 running solaris 7

Thanks in advance for your help.
:slight_smile:

2

Hi Dennis

After you connected the tape-drive you need to boot with option -r, the -r option scans all connected devices and rebuilds the /devices directory.

SO,

Shutdown the machine, and on the OK-prompt type boot -r

After the reboot you can check the /dev/rmt directoy for existence of your tape device.
If so you can test your tape drive, using tar
Like:
`cd /etc`
`tar -cvf /dev/rmt/<your device> ./*`

this commands write a tar archive of /etc/ to your new tape drive

it will be usefull to also test the restore option.
`cd /tmp`
`tar -xvf /dev/rmt/<your device> .`

If both work you can be happy

3

if the above still did not solve the problem.
before issuing the tar command.

issue

devfsadm or drvconfig

this will update the /device directory

now try backing up using tar command

is the tape drive a jukebox or tape library?

4

Hi

Thanks all for your wonderful feedbacks....much appreciated.

The system was able to see the tape drive when I connect it to the systerm directly bypassing my external SCSI HD and all backup and restore are working.

It would make sense if HD is bad but it is working fine. Still puzzle me what the cause is...well more researching I guess.

thanks again janr and hasan2.

5

Does all the devices have the same SCSI interface, sometimes when you mixup differernt scsi interface this problem can happen.

First rule put the oldest interface at the end af the chain.

Also make sure the location of the terminator, maybe your disk has an internal terminator.