#Tape Drive Question
3 messages in this thread
I have a question regarding the Corel SCSI Pro. I have purchased it in hopes
of backing up my hard drives using a SCSI Tape drive. The tape drive is about 5
years old and was originally on a unix machine running BSD. The manufacturer
is Wangtek. After installing the software and tring the tape backup, I waited
an hour before it the backup program said that the was no device drivers for
this drive. I don't understand why you can't support all SCSI tape drives. Is
not the main set of SCSI comamnds the same a SCSI hard drives. And I haven't
heard of a driver need for a certain SCSI drive. Is the drive to old that the
SCSI tape drivers don't support the older SCSI interfaces??? I there anything I
can do to fix this, besides spending $400+ for a new SCSI tape drive?
Darren Hamilton
The key fact is "five years old." The fact is, most SCSI devices until the
advent of the ASPI standard were not really designed to be SCSI in the
chainable sense we think of now. They were designed to be run from a card
specifically designed to run the device and with a driver that spoke directly
to the board. No chaining was possible unless it was precisely the same device.
The ASPI standard, which requires some chip support as "hooks" in the
device, is used by a ton of devices now and CorelSCSI has led the way to a true
SCSI interface–but it can't be responsible for the mistakes of third party
makers in not joining the club.
If a device is not ASPI compliant it can't be run by an ASPI manager any
more than if it were an IDE device. Period.
MASTER.TXT and PROLIS.TXT here in LIB3 list all the devices CorelSCSI
certifies that it supports.
Darren,
The command set for both hard drives and tape drives is different. This is not
normally the problem though. Specific bios revisions supported certain
features. We certify drives using the new command sequences, perhaps it will
not work with the older drives if the drive doesn't support the new command
sequences.
What you can try doing is taking the enquiry string from the drive
(scanscsi.exe will give it to you). Then edit the TAPEDRV.DAT file. After
studying the format of this file for a few moment you will see what you have to
do to encorporate the new enquiry information. Check up the list for an entry
that matches yours and use the same number at the end of the line. (heck, if
you have the time try them all once the enquiry information is altered…).
This is the only way to gain support for unsupported tapes.
I hope this helps.
Laszlo