[ale] [Somewhat OT] Troubleshooting help request w/ external tape drive

[James P. Kinney III]

Chris,

There's no need to do further testing. The r/w head is trashed. The
rewind noises during write is the "shoeshining" as the system backs up
to try writing again what it missed. The clean light comes on to say it
can't read the tape well enough. If cleaning with a fresh cleaner tape
fails, the drive needs to be serviced. Since it was dumped on ebay, the
servicing costs more than a replacement.

It's a door stop.

On Thu, 2005-07-21 at 10:42 -0400, Christopher Woodfield wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I bought an external DDS4 tape drive off of eBay last week, which I  
> plan to use with my Mac desktop machine and Retrospect 6.0 backup  
> software. Right off the bat, things aren't working correctly - the  
> tape drive's "Clean" LED comes on after only a few hours of use, the  
> drive makes some odd wind/rewind noises during the write phase, and  
> I'm unable to successfully restore anything that gets written to  
> tape. Retrospect's "verify" run hangs, as if it's trying over and  
> over again to read data and failing.
> 
> The drive is a Seagate STD6401LW drive, with a 68-pin Ultra2 SCSI  
> external interface.
> 
> What I'd like to be able to do is use the drive with a different  
> system, to verify that the problem is the drive, and not any of the  
> other components (cable, terminator, SCSI adapter, software, etc). I  
> have a PC available that I can put either Windows or Linux onto for  
> this purpose, but I can't justify buying another SCSI adapter, cable,  
> and terminator just for one test.
> 
> Does anyone have a spare SCSI adapter, cable and terminator that I  
> could borrow for this test? I'm in Midtown, but can certainly venture  
> OTP to pick up.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> -Chris Woodfield
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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