Cartridge tape drive hangs in open (SCO Unix). HELP!!!

[George Bron Faison]

Niklas:

Don't know if this will help or not but you sounded desparate :-{  so I
thought I'd pass it along for what it's worth (reference an Archive SCSI tape
hangiing on open).

I've seen similar problems with Archive drives both SCSI and non-SCSI
under ISC 386/ix 2.x.x and we found a kludgy solution, that was to always
call the Archive "ctape" utility with a rewind call.  Apparently this resets
the board or something, at any rate, since we started doing this we've never
had another cartridge tape hang.  Just do a "ctape rewind" in your shell
script or system(...) if C program and maybe it will help.

I send this idea along for what it's worth and hope that it helps.  This
does seem to be a common problem for Archive cartridge tape drives...maybe
they should fix it, eh?

Bron @ cup.portal.com