Tape drive fun

[giza]

Well, 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. :-)

Comments

[brophey.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, having the master/slave stuff wrong on IDE will kill the system. CD-ROMs are notorious for actually being visible on the IDE channels despite being jumpered wrong. Hard drives will usually just not show up.

Huh? No jumper on that CD-ROM?

[coyoteden.livejournal.com]

You should have a jumper on there already, probably in the master or maybe cable-select position. if there are NO jumpers on there, well, that's the source of your problem. With no jumper, some drives default to cable-select, some to master, some don't come up at all, and some pick up noise on the pins and choose randomly :-)

The reason it worked before is that your tape was most likely cable-select or slave by default.

I prefer to cable-select ATA devices unless I find one that doesn't play nice. Actually, I don't like the whole BDSM thing at all: ATA really isn't good about bus hogging. For example, some CD-ROM drives hold the bus busy while spinning up or ejecting discs. Real annoying when you have another drive in use on that bus.

There are no slave drives in my system. DVD as master on bus 0, CDR as master on bus 1. HDDs are on a RAID controller and each drive has its own bus.

Re: Huh? No jumper on that CD-ROM?

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

You should have a jumper on there already, probably in the master or maybe cable-select position. if there are NO jumpers on there, well, that's the source of your problem.

I've seen drives where the absence of a jumper meant "slave". The sticker on the drive should indicate how its jumpers should be configured for each case.

Kitbashed jumpers.

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

If you're short on jumpers, a piece of a paperclip bent into "jumper contact" shape with needle-nose pliers works well enough. It's just more of a pain to take out later (and requires you to have a pair of needle-nose pliers handy).

Re: Kitbashed jumpers.

[giza.livejournal.com]

If I'm REALLY lucky, I'll get some arcing between pins adjacent to the paperclip, and I can watch the drive be confused about whether it's the master or servant! (Just like the Depeche Mode song... hmm...)

Re: Kitbashed jumpers.

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

If I'm REALLY lucky, I'll get some arcing between pins adjacent to the paperclip, and I can watch the drive be confused about whether it's the master or servant!

Only if you're powering the drive with a tesla coil };>. Voltage for arcing is 1 kV/mm. Just use a paper clip thin enough and shaped carefully enough that you have no chance of accidentally shorting adjacent pins by direct contact (not a difficult requirement).