EXABYTE 8200 on FreeBSD 5.3

[Scott Ballantyne]

I know this is ancient technology, but we have a pile of exabyte tapes
made on an 8200 and would like to recover some of the data on them.

We have an old 5.3 machine which has an adaptec 2120S, and the Exabyte
is connected to that. The kernel identifies the Exabyte on boot, but
it's all downhill after that.

The driver sometimes spits out a pile of errors (I'll append a sample
at the end) and mt doesn't seem to do simple commands (like a retension).

I note that the MT page for 5.3 says that not all SCSI-1 devices are
supported. So before I invest more time in this, I am wondering if
anyone can tell if the support is there for this configuration?

If not, what (inexpensive) options do I have for possibly retrieving
this data?

Thanks a lot,
Scott
-- 
sdb at ssr.com

An "mt status" causes the driver to report:

(sa0:aacp0:0:4:0): MODE SENSE(06). CDB: 1a 0 f 0 1c 0 
(sa0:aacp0:0:4:0): ILLEGAL REQUEST asc:0,0
(sa0:aacp0:0:4:0): No additional sense information
(sa0:aacp0:0:4:0): MODE SENSE(06). CDB: 1a 0 f 0 1c 0 
(sa0:aacp0:0:4:0): ILLEGAL REQUEST asc:0,0
(sa0:aacp0:0:4:0): No additional sense information
(sa0:aacp0:0:4:0): MODE SENSE(06). CDB: 1a 0 f 0 1c 0 
(sa0:aacp0:0:4:0): ILLEGAL REQUEST asc:0,0
(sa0:aacp0:0:4:0): No additional sense information
(sa0:aacp0:0:4:0): MODE SENSE(06). CDB: 1a 0 f 0 1c 0 
(sa0:aacp0:0:4:0): ILLEGAL REQUEST asc:0,0
(sa0:aacp0:0:4:0): No additional sense information
(sa0:aacp0:0:4:0): MODE SENSE(06). CDB: 1a 0 f 0 1c 0 
(sa0:aacp0:0:4:0): ILLEGAL REQUEST asc:0,0
(sa0:aacp0:0:4:0): No additional sense information
(sa0:aacp0:0:4:0): MODE SENSE(06). CDB: 1a 0 f 0 1c 0 
(sa0:aacp0:0:4:0): ILLEGAL REQUEST asc:0,0
(sa0:aacp0:0:4:0): No additional sense information


While mt reports:

Mode      Density              Blocksize      bpi      Compression
Current:  default              variable       0        unsupported
---------available modes---------
0:        default              variable       0        unsupported
1:        default              variable       0        unsupported
2:        default              variable       0        unsupported
3:        default              variable       0        unsupported
---------------------------------
Current Driver State: at rest.
---------------------------------
File Number: 0	Record Number: 0	Residual Count 0