Apollos and tape drives...

[Jules Richardson]

For the archives, as this might save someone else a lot of messing
around one day :-)

Was struggling to get a 400t to install from tape as it'd always die
with "(open_input_volume) Unable to open volume. (unrecognized error
status 28000B)" after doing a tape retension when loading from the boot
tape.

It was driving me nuts as I'd tested the drive and media elsewhere and
it was fine, plus it was reading CALENDAR / INVOL / DOMAIN_OS from the
boot tape fine. I spent a long time messing around with SCSI cabling,
double and triple checking devices ID's etc.

As a last resort I tried my 150MB SCSI tape drive - I've known it to be
a little flakey with reads sometimes, but I just wanted to see if
behaviour was different. Guess what - it's worked fine!

The 150MB drive is a little newer than my 60MB one. All I can think of
is that the 60MB drive takes a little too long to become ready again
after the retension for the Apollo's liking, and it times out. Maybe
it'd be fine on a slower machine (DN3000 / DN3500 say) but it isn't up
to the job on a 400 series system.

Anyway, maybe this'll save someone a bit of pain one day (it takes
around 15 minutes each to run invol and calendar from tape and well over
30 for domain_os, so it's rather a slow process to keep on having to do!
- I've probably run through it ten times in the last 2 days trying to
figure out what was going on)

cheers

Jules