To Anyone Who Can Help:
I am having trouble formatting tapes with the following hardware:
Generic socket 7 AT board, 128 Mb RAM, with PCI slots, though I don't think
they're causing problems
AMD K6 - 2 300
Standard "on the board" FD controller, standard teac / sony / mitsumi floppy
drive
Exabyte Eagle TR-3 tape drive
Running the following OS / software:
RedHat Linux 5.2
Stock RH kernel 2.0.36
Ftape 4.02
Ftape Tools 1.07 (both Ftape pkg compiled from source - not installed from
RPMs)
Modules Ftape, Zftape, and Ftape-internal loaded (in that respective order)
The problem manifests itself like this:
Ftformat --mode=auto --format-parameters qic-standard=TR-3 (enter)
The tape length is detected, and after a few minutes, parameters for the tape
drive are displayed. Then "Writing reference bursts..." appears. One can hear the
drive move the tape a short distance about 6 times, then the drive stops, and
"Reference Burst write failed ... Error code 36" is displayed.
The logs did not help (yet). There was only one line referring to an error.
This is with debug messages enabled at compile time in the ftape-4.02 MCONFIG file. I
printed the log file, which only gave me the first 80 chars of each line. The line
which refers to the error read
May 10 (snip) ftape-io.c (ftape_report_error_R1e3
I can track it down and get the whole line tomorrow if necessary.
This problem exists regardless of switches & options used with ftformat
(except for -no-reference-bursts of course).
If anyone can point me in the right direction I would seriously appreciate
help.
Thanks,
Charles Headlee
