Test results of SCSI devices on MicroVAX 3100

From: Bob Lafleur <bob_lafleur_at_technologist.com>
Date: Sun Jun 9 01:33:59 2002

I've accumulated a stack of external SCSI-2 devices that I thought I'd
try out on my MicroVAX 3100. All devices show during a SCSI bus scan
from the console prompt, and as devices when VMS 7.3 was booted from the
internal hard drive. But they worked with varrying degress of success.
Here are the results:

"GENERIC CD-R CRD-800S" - This is an 8x CD-R (not CD-RW) drive; it
reports as "GENERIC" but it really is a Sanyo CD-R CRD-800S. I've even
updated it with the Sanyo firmware and it still reports as "GENERIC". I
tried to boot the mini-VMS in SYS1 of my VMS 7.3 CD-ROM. Boot failre
right away. Booted VMS from the hard drive, and tried to mount a CD-ROM,
and I got invalid media format.

"Yamaha CD-R 400c" - This is a 4x CD-R drive. I tried to boot the
mini-VMS and it started to boot, until after it asked for the date &
time, then it went into mount-verificiation mode, and just hung. I
booted VMS from the hard drive, and tried to mount a CD-ROM disc and got
the same message as with the CRD-800S - invalid media format.

"Toshiba XM-3401TA" - Just a plain old CD-ROM drive, I think it's a 2x.
I could boot the mini-VMS in SYS1 from it, and when I booted VMS from my
hard drive, I could mount CD-ROM discs fine. No problems with operation
at all.

"MATSHITA LF-3000" - This is a 128MB MO (magneto-optical) drive, it's in
a box badged "Optical Access International" and I originally purchased
it for my Mac - it has always worked fine on the Mac. From the console
prompt, a TEST F1 (SCSI OPTION Utilities) device scan showed it with a
device name of JK (JKB400 in my specific situation) and the device type
shows as "OPTDISK" but when I booted VMS from the hard drive it showed
as a DKB400 device. I tried it INIT a disk, and got a "media is offline"
error. I've had similar results trying to make this drive work on the PC
- it is recognized fine, but when I try to use it, it seems to go away.
Maybe there is newer firmware for it that corrects the problem, but it
isn't a major issue at this point. I do find it strange that the console
shows it as a JK device, but VMS shows it as a DK device.

"TK50Z-GA" - Of course, it worked without a problem.

Has anyone tried a Travan 4 SCSI tape drive? Specifically, the HP
SureStore T4?

   - Bob
Received on Sun Jun 09 2002 - 01:33:59 BST