troubles with an Exhabyte tape drive

[Kenneth D. Merry]

On Thu, May 15, 2003 at 16:07:02 -0400, Mikhail Teterin wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> We can read the tapes using this drive:
> 
> sym0: <875> port 0x2400-0x24ff mem 0x42000000-0x42000fff,0x42100000-0x421000ff 
> irq 11 at device 16.0 on pci0
> sym0: Symbios NVRAM, ID 7, Fast-20, SE, parity checking
> sym0: open drain IRQ line driver, using on-chip SRAM
> sym0: using LOAD/STORE-based firmware.
> sa0 at sym0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
> sa0: <EXABYTE EXB-89008E030203 V41e> Removable Sequential Access SCSI-2 device 
> sa0: 20.000MB/s transfers (10.000MHz, offset 15, 16bit)
> 
> 
> but we can not write anything :-( The kernel's messages logged are:
> 
> 	(sa0:sym0:0:0:0): WRITE(06). CDB: a 0 0 28 0 0 
> 	(sa0:sym0:0:0:0): ILLEGAL REQUEST asc:30,5
> 	(sa0:sym0:0:0:0): Cannot write medium - incompatible format
> 
> Is it our clumsiness, or the tapes (we tried about a dozen), or the
> drive? Thanks a lot!

I'm guessing it's the tapes.  That's what the message seems to say.

Are you *sure* your tapes are write compatible with the drive?  I know
there are various Exabyte drives that can read, but not write, old
format tapes.

Since you can read the tapes but can't write them, I'm guessing that that's
the problem.

Ken
-- 
Kenneth Merry
ken at kdm.org