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Tape drive fun
Oct. 23rd, 2003 10:12 amWell, my new tape drive arrived yesterday. I ended up ordering one from Compuview who shipped it out the same day I ordered and had it arrive the very next day. I went to install it last night, and I got an unexpected bonus when I took my old tape drive out: the main drive belt had slipped off one of one of the spools. I reattached that, and the old drive should be good as new! I think I'm still going to keep the new one, though.
First interesting surprise I got is that when replacing the old drive with the new, my system would no longer see the CD-ROM drive. Furthermore, when I tried doing anything to the tape drive, it would take a couple of minutes before the tape drive actually DID anything, and I would get messages stating "lost interrupt" to the kernel log. Once I removed the CD-ROM drive from the second IDE bus, that problem went away and the tape drive worked just fine, allowing me to read my existing backups and make a new one. (And I also get to start cleaning the drive regularly, joy!)
Another point of interest is that I tried using the tape that caused the old tape drive to die in the new tape drive. As soon as I put it in, it began making all sorts of nasty noises, noises that tapes aren't supposed to make! So it looks as though the tape actually ate itself on Monday night. Well, dissecting that tape will make for an interesting project sometime. I wonder... if I unwind the tape down the hallway of my apartment building, will the RIAA try to sue me for "file sharing"? :-)
I then tried placing the CD-ROM drive as the secondary device on the primary IDE bus and discovered that it didn't play nice with my hard drive. I then disconnected my CD-ROM drive and gave up on that for the evening. However, after doing a little research online (and poking around at another drive I had), it looks like I just need to jumper the CD-ROM drive to tell it to act as a slave. It is interesting that my old tape drive didn't mind the CD-ROM on the same bus, though. Maybe it was jumpered differently.
Now all I gotta do are find some jumper blocks. I sheepishly realized last night that all of my jumpers are in my toolkit, which I left behind at my parents' house when I moved out a few years ago. Oops. :-)
First interesting surprise I got is that when replacing the old drive with the new, my system would no longer see the CD-ROM drive. Furthermore, when I tried doing anything to the tape drive, it would take a couple of minutes before the tape drive actually DID anything, and I would get messages stating "lost interrupt" to the kernel log. Once I removed the CD-ROM drive from the second IDE bus, that problem went away and the tape drive worked just fine, allowing me to read my existing backups and make a new one. (And I also get to start cleaning the drive regularly, joy!)
Another point of interest is that I tried using the tape that caused the old tape drive to die in the new tape drive. As soon as I put it in, it began making all sorts of nasty noises, noises that tapes aren't supposed to make! So it looks as though the tape actually ate itself on Monday night. Well, dissecting that tape will make for an interesting project sometime. I wonder... if I unwind the tape down the hallway of my apartment building, will the RIAA try to sue me for "file sharing"? :-)
I then tried placing the CD-ROM drive as the secondary device on the primary IDE bus and discovered that it didn't play nice with my hard drive. I then disconnected my CD-ROM drive and gave up on that for the evening. However, after doing a little research online (and poking around at another drive I had), it looks like I just need to jumper the CD-ROM drive to tell it to act as a slave. It is interesting that my old tape drive didn't mind the CD-ROM on the same bus, though. Maybe it was jumpered differently.
Now all I gotta do are find some jumper blocks. I sheepishly realized last night that all of my jumpers are in my toolkit, which I left behind at my parents' house when I moved out a few years ago. Oops. :-)
