Help Needed with Sun3 Shoebox on Sun2

[Michael A. Justice]

I have had a similar (or the same) problem with my SLC and WangTek QIC-150
drive.  Not sure of the drive's part number, sorry.  Oh, my hard drive's a
Fujitsu M2263SA (the 660mb one) in case it's relevant.  Also, I've taken
out the terminating resistors from the tape drive, and am using an
external terminator instead.

BTW, I haven't run across the "96A0" error.  Is it a different drive
model???

During my initial setup, I got a "sense key" error when the tape drive was
attempting to load the "usr" files.  I thought I'd received a bad tape,
and got another one;  this one loaded on the first try, but ONLY on that
first try.

A couple of days later, when I was about to mail the "defective tapes"
back, I figured I'd better check to make sure I was really sending back
the bad set.  I attempted to reinstall, found that I'd nearly kept the
"bad" ones, and tried to reinstall the other set.  Also bad, and with the
same error (usually on the same block of the file, too).

It only worked that one time.  My VAR thinks it's a bad PROM, and has had
me replace the original PROM twice.  The new ones haven't even been able
to begin reading the tapes, so I've left the original one in.  (At least
it worked that one time.)  Last time I talked to him, he mentioned
swapping drives if the latest new PROM didn't work (which it didn't).

The drive seems to read/write single large files (tar) just fine;  I have
no good guess as to what's wrong.

You might want to try-and-try-again repeatedly;  mine did work that one
single solitary time (out of about six tries with the original worked-once
PROM, and six with the two "new-and-improved" PROMs).

>Another, related, question - do I have to terminate the SCSI out on the
>showbox, or is that handled internally?

My tape drive had two resistors in sockets next to the SCSI plug, which
were for termination.  I pulled 'em and am using an external terminator,
though -- more convenient.  I don't know if there're any negatives to
doing that.

>Thanks very much!

No prob.  Sorry this isn't much help.  If you (or anyone else) has any
idea of what would fix this, I'd appreciate a copy of the message!
(Thanks!)

Also, does 'install' write the disk files as it's reading the tape file,
or does it read the whole tape file into a blank spot on the disk and then
write out all of the disk files?  I've probably got some clobbered files
if it's the first way (although nothing has seemed to break yet).

Michael Justice / 2250 N Lincoln Ave. #203 / Chicago, IL 60068 / (312) 404-1493
  ...{mcdchg|gargoyle|hombre|orbit}!chinet!justice OR justice at chinet.chi.il.us
  justice at gagme.chi.il.us              and Real Soon Now:  justice@??????? :-)