Need advice on a tape drive

[Russ Kepler]

In article <551 at marob.MASA.COM> daveh at marob.masa.com (Dave Hammond) writes:
>I recommend *against* purchasing Emerald Systems XNX- series cartridge
>tape drives.  They require a proprietary controller to operate, and
>Xenix 2.3.1 apparently *lost* its previous ability (demonstrated in 2.2)
>to handle these drives [a late-night tech support hack mused about
>not having an Emerald in-house to test the 2.3.1 drivers prior to release,
>and placing Emerald on the list of supported drives under the "assumption"
>that what worked correctly on 2.2 would work correctly on 2.3].

I am now up and running using an Emerald XNX 60-9000 tape drive using
Xenix 2.3.1.  The tape drive operates quite nicely - as nice as it did
under 2.2 using Emeralds' tape driver.  But I guess that it will take
a while to dump 250Mb no matter what it is being dumped to...

Earlier I reported that I was having trouble configuring the tape
driver in Xenix - turned out that I was reading the manual instead
of the screen.  The mkdev command displays instructions to enter the
tape controller I/O port in the form ####h (masm-ish) and the manual
lists all lof the default I/O ports in the form 0x#### (c-ish).  I
kept entering the I/O port in the c-ish form - rather stupid of me...
Anyway, after a bit of time on the phone with an SCO support person
I got straightened out if not a bit embarrassed.

-- 
Russ Kepler -  Basis International
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