vocadesign Posted March 27, 2006 Report Share Posted March 27, 2006 We currently back up a G4 733 (about 50gb) to a SCSI DDS4 tape drive using Retrospect v6.1.126. The problem is that the tape gets to about 19.something gb full and just stops, no errors, no messages. In fact nothing to tell me why it's stopped, and nothing in the log file. Does anybody have any ideas? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
twickland Posted March 27, 2006 Report Share Posted March 27, 2006 More information please: For starters, model of your tape drive and how long you've been using it; whether you are using any other tape drives; model of SCSI host adapter; OS X system version. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vocadesign Posted March 27, 2006 Author Report Share Posted March 27, 2006 I'm at home now and the drives at work so I'll give more detailed info in the morning (I live in the UK). I few extra details from the top of my head. It's quite an old drive that we used to backup the G4 with under OS9. We've gone back to it in Tiger (OS 10.4.5) as the firewire tape drive we used to use has died (it's completely disconected and a new version of Retrospect has had a clean install). The firewire drive was using Retrospect v5.something and working fine until the drive died after a couple of years. I know v5.whatever is not supported in Tiger. Don't know the drive make/model or SCSI type until tomorrow. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vocadesign Posted March 28, 2006 Author Report Share Posted March 28, 2006 The tape drive appears to be a HP DAT DDS-DC (C5683A) attached via SCSI-A. The Mac is a G4 Digital Audio from early 2001 running 10.4.5. Do you need more info? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
twickland Posted March 28, 2006 Report Share Posted March 28, 2006 You need to go to "About This Mac" in the Apple menu, click on "More Info..." to launch the System Profiler, and then under "Hardware," click on "PCI/AGP Cards." This will enable you to see the brand and model of your SCSI adapter, as well as its ROM Revision (firmware version). There are many older cards that worked fine under earlier system versions, but that are unsupported under current OSes. Even a supported card may need a driver or firmware update to function properly. If a host adapter card is unsupported, your only options are to replace the card or to revert the operating system to an earlier version that supports the card. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vocadesign Posted March 30, 2006 Author Report Share Posted March 30, 2006 The SCSI card is an Adaptec AVA 2906 which came with the Mac (OS9) when it arrived (brand new) in the office. I've been to the Adaptec website and downloaded the latest Mac OSX driver and after installing and rebooting, Retrospect still hangs at 19.something GB. I've found the original CD which came with the card but it's obviously for OS9. I don't want to spend (no budget) any money on a solution so do you have a further ideas. Will it work in Classic or would I need to install OS9 and reboot into OS9 and then backup from there? Thanks for your help so far. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
twickland Posted March 30, 2006 Report Share Posted March 30, 2006 Classic won't help. You'll need to downgrade your system to use the card. Adaptec claims the card willl run under 10.3.x, but I'd be a bit dubious how high the "x" can go; you could experiment. It's likely to be OK under 10.2.8. It will certainly be OK under 9.2.2, but you will need the OS 9 driver. I suspect that communication is failing when the tape becomes full, around 19 GB. This is most likely the fault of the SCSI adapter, but it might turn out to be in the drive itself. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vocadesign Posted March 30, 2006 Author Report Share Posted March 30, 2006 Yep I think you're right. I tried contacting Adaptec for support but they wanted $80 to talk to me as the card is well out of warranty. I suppose I could load 9.2.2 on a separate partition and boot in to that at the end of each day to do a back-up. A bit cumbersome but will probably do in the short term. There's a thread on the Apple forums http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=704512? that talks about this. Seems I'm not the only person with this problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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