Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!orion.oac.uci.edu!uci-ics!jbeckley
From: jbeckley@ics.uci.edu (Jeff D. Beckley)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Subject: Re: A2091 & Removable media
Message-ID: <25E6448E.29748@paris.ics.uci.edu>
Date: 24 Feb 90 08:23:42 GMT
References: <120.25E527C0@afitamy.fidonet.org>
Reply-To: jbeckley@ics.uci.edu (Jeff D. Beckley)
Organization: UC Irvine Department of ICS
Lines: 43

I have recieved numerous questions about my post using a tape-b/u unit
and sysquest with my 2091.  I would gladly respond via E-Mail but I am
having trouble getting a permanent address (have to change accounts
every $100 at UCI cause I'm not a Computer Science major...).

Basically the sysquest seem to work fine interfaced with the 2091
provided that you issue a diskchange command after changing media and
that all media has the exact same partitions (you can defeat this
restriction by rebooting).  I have recieved reports of trouble
in formatting but I have only done read/write on pre-formatted media,
so until I setup that hardware configuration, I can't confirm that
formats will work.

As for Tape B/U.  I had no luck forcing AmigaDos to recognize my
SCSI tape devices (actually it can see it, just not use it effectively
:-) ).  I was/am able to use SCSI tape units by using my own software
which is far from elegant.  I have sold the rights (closer to gave
the rights to...) of the code to IVS (trumpcard) for use with thier
contorller.  They are adding their own user interface.  Once I can get
a permanent account, and assuming that IVS has no objections (I very
seriously doubt they will), I will clean up the code and release it.
You still won't be able to talk to the tape through std AmigaDos
so QuarterBack will do you no good, but I can succesfully do a full
image B/U of a 48 MEG ST-157N-1 in under 20 minutes, so it shouldn't
be too much of an incovenience, at least until 1.4 comes out and
blows me out of the water (yea!).

For anyone interested in doing there own code, the main thing to be
aware of is that the Tape units I tried can't keep up with your HD,
if you try to write on the fly, even with buffers you will at the
best case have large gaps in your tape and thus greatly reduce the
restore speed, and tape capasity.  Thus, the quick and dirty way to read
in as much as you can in MEM and then dump it out to the Tape, at its
speed.

GoodLuck,

-Jason-
--
Gumby
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