rgliebe Posted January 5, 2004 Report Share Posted January 5, 2004 I have confirmed a problem with Retrospect 5.1.175 with the SCSI update installed on a PowerMac G4 Gigabit Ethernet that has a 1.3 GHz G4 upgrade. I use a Compaq DDS-4 4mm DAT tape drive on a SCSI channel with a lot of hard drives. The problem did not show up immediately when I swapped out a troublesome Adaptec 39160 (their OS X driver support is weak) for an Atto UL3D. I am running OS X 10.2.8 with all patches and the latest Atto driver (2.1.0) and firmware (1.6.6). I did incremental backups (about 1 GB at a time) for weeks without any problems. However, when I did a full backup at the beginning of this year (about 45 GB), I stumbled into this problem on the second tape and was able to repeat it again after skipping to a third tape. The problem is that Retrospect gets frozen trying to write to the tape drive, which is also hung up in an endless loop of attempting to write. The only solution is to force quit Retrospect and reboot to reset the SCSI bus. Only the tape drive is unaddressable on the SCSI bus until it is power cycled on reboot. The hard drives are just fine. For some reason, each time after rebooting, a catalog update was necessary for the ENTIRE contents of the tape, not just the area where the write problem occurred. When the catalog update process reaches the bad point on the tape, it hangs up and freezes Retrospect, putting the tape drive into an endless read loop. This time the update process can be cancelled within Retrospect, which then reports back that there is a media read error due to bad media, dirty head, etc. (the -206 error). Without human intervention, Retrospect will stay hung up trying to address the tape drive forever. The biggest problem is that nothing else can be written to the tape again, and one must skip onto new blank media to continue the storageset. To see if this problem was unique to this particular configuration, or all Atto cards in general, I moved the tape drive to a Beige G3 Server running OS X Server 10.2.8 with an Atto PSC card in it. The same firmware release and driver were installed, which are the latest. The results so far have been good, with nearly two full tapes written to without any problems. So, I believe that the SCSI update does not fully address all the problems with at least one Atto card and needs to be looked at again for another update. This problem is hard to reproduce and could take many hours of writing to tape to observe. Retrospect also needs to be more robust when encountering read/write problems and not freeze up. It should stop and report the appropriate error after a reasonable timeout period occurs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted January 6, 2004 Report Share Posted January 6, 2004 Hi Last time I checked Apple does not support OSX with any processor upgrade cards. I have seen similar problems in the past with these cards and SCSI. Any chance you can reproduce this without the upgrade card installed? Thanks nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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