Tape on Dell 2450, changes with no luck

[Scott Long]

pgrunwald at comcast.net wrote:
>>Sorry for coming into the conversation late. Since this is my driver 
>>and I'm very familiar with the 2450, the 7899, and scsi in general, 
>>can I ask a few questions? First, it's not clear from your previous 
>>emails that the tape drive in on a different channel from the disk 
>>drives. There might be confusion here because you kept on refering 
>>to the target id of each device as a 'channel', whereas it's normal 
>>to refer to each cable as a channel that contains up to 15 targets. 
> 
> 
> Sorry for my lack of clarity.  There are two scsi connectors on the motherboard.  One is connected to the raid 5 set of drives. I had originally connected the tape drive on this chain and then was told by dell that I needed to go off of a separate cable and the other connector.
> 
> 
> 
>>The boot BIOS should show both a PERC banner and a 7899/Ultra160 banner. 
>>If the tape drive is on the second channel then it should show up under 
>>the 7899 banner, not the PERC banner. 
> 
> 
> The current problem that that I'm not seeing the 7899 banner.  With Dell yesterday, we reset the NVRAM with the jumper and could only see the 7899 for one boot.  In bios we set the SCSI for SCSI/SCSI and saw it.  When we set it for RAID/SCSI on the next - we only saw the PERC at boot time.  This is independent of which cable the tape is on.  I have always/only seen the drive on the PERC channel.
> 
> Dell has told me this is a hardware problem and the system is suspect.  Do you concur?
> 
> If your system only has a single 
> 
>>cable/channel servicing the entire backplane, then I guess that you have 
>>no choice but to have the tape on the same channel as the raid disks, 
>>but again I need more details here. And if that's the case, then we 
>>might need to hack the aacp driver a bit to make it work. 
>>The only exception to what I said earlier would be if you are using 
>>the 'latest and greatest' PERC BIOS, which is rumored to commandeer the 
>>second SCSI channel and forces all SCSI to go through the RAID device. 
> 
> 
> I am using the 2.8 Perc bios:
> 
> Release TitleSCSI RAID: Adaptec PERC3/Si, Firmware, Multi Language, PowerEdge 2450, v.2.8.0.6092, A13
> Release Date08/13/2004
> CategorySCSI Raid
> 

This would be the Latest and Greatest BIOS that I mentioned.  This is 
unfortunate, and explains why no 7899 banner gets displayed unless you
are in SCSI/SCSI mode.  The second SCSI channel is now a virtual SCSI
channel serviced by the RAID controller.  You cannot create arrays on
it, but all drive access must go through the RAID driver now instead of
the SCSI driver.  What this means for FreeBSD is that the aacp driver
is now the only access mechanism available for the second channel.

These BIOS changes were prompted by a Windows compatibility problem.
If you're not running Windows then I would suggest trying to locate
a prior bios, either in the 2.6 or 2.7 lineage.  If that's not
possible then we'll have to hack the aac and aacp drivers to work.
I don't like doing this because the RAID firmware really doesn't handle
SCSI pass-through very well, and often times gets very upset by some
of the things that the FreeBSD SCSI layer tries to do.

If you want to follow Dell's tech support path, that's you're choice,
but I believe that the BIOS and firmware is operating as designed now.
I'll get ahold of my contacts at Adaptec and confirm this.

Scott