"Aaron J. Grier" wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 24, 1999 at 02:24:11PM -0500, Mauricio Tavares wrote:
> > 	I have here an ancient Irwin tape drive I decided to slap to my 5000/20
> > just to see if the tape drive works.  When I did that and checked the
> > configuration of the machine, this is what I got:
> [SNIP]
> >             DEV   PID                VID        REV    SCSI DEV
> >             ===== ================== ========== ====== ========
> >             rz0   MAVERICK 540S      QUANTUM    0901   DIR
> >             rz4   BACKUP             IRWIN      C002   DIR
> [SNIP]
> > Wouldn't that mean that it sees the tape drive as a HD instead of a tape?
> > And, what must you do to support the drive through tar?  This is soemthing
> > I've really never done. =O

I missed this first time around - it sounds like the device is reporting
that it's a direct access (ie disk) device at the SCSI level.  Do you
know if this tape drive has ever worked on any operating system?

As far as using a working tape drive, something like:

	tar cf /dev/nrst0 file ...
	mt -f /dev/nrst0 offline

should work.

> If I'm not mistaken, tapes need to be on ID 5 or 6.  (I have a TZK10 on
> ID6 and it shows up as tz1 -- if it were on ID5 it would be tz0.)

That's a NetBSD/pmax restriction because of the old SCSI driver.
However, the driver will detect it as a disk drive if that's what the
device wants to advertise itself as.

Simon.