On 04/08/05 11:11 pm Steven Levine tossed the following ingredients into
the ever-growing pot of cybersoup:

>  >I managed to navigate the "Engrish" instructions for
emergency ejection
>  >of tapes and magazines in the on-line Compaq manual, and now all seems
>  >to be hunky dory after an hour or so's fiddling.
> 
>  >This was one of my most successful eBay purchases ever: I paid more for
>  >an empty magazine than I did for this autoloader + magazine + 8 tapes.
> 
> Pretty cool.  So does this mean you have started to make backups with this
> big boy?

I've run a couple of 2-tape backups now, and they seem to have gone OK. 
Yet I'm not sure that the software (BA2K) is smart enough for the drive: 
as far as I (a novice when it comes to SCSI media manipulation commands) 
can tell from reading the docs. for the drive and observing what 
happens, I think that the software is sending the UNLOAD command when it 
finishes (even though I have *not* selected "Eject media after backup") 
rather than MOVE MEDIA (i.e., back into the magazine). The result is 
that the drive gets taken out of Random mode and switched into 
Sequential mode, the next tape is loaded automatically, and the software 
  cannot then select a specific tape for the next job. I have to eject 
the  magazine using the front-panel control, then reload it before the 
software can direct backups to specific tapes again.

Nevertheless, I can now do unattended multi-tape backups, and I can 
specify that the drive is to be cleaned before a backup job (if I have a
cleaning tape in slot 8).

All in all, I am pretty pleased with this purchase. Now I need to get a 
few more magazines so I don't have to keep shuffling tapes around.

-=-
Alan




 
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