As a followup to the previous posts let me elaborate on what has been done since these were posted. The system is a Pentium 4 2.0Ghz w/ Adaptec 2100S Raid controller, 1GB memory, Archive Python 4106 12/24GB DAT tape drive, and 4-18GB hard drives. For the tape drive we have tried four SCSI controllers: Adaptec's AHA-2940AU & AHA-2940U, Symbios 53C8XX, and Tekram's DC-3051E PCI SCSI controllers. I have been able to install SCO Openserver 5.0.7 and 5.0.6 on the system. It is currently configured with 5.0.6. For the Symbios and Tekram controllers, once I install the drivers and the tape drive, Lone Tar will fail a read and the tar command will return a blocksize = 0. The Adaptec controllers will partially read the tape and will fail at various places on the tape giving me the following error:
tar: tape read error
read: No such device or address
I have taken the tape drive to the system this one is replacing (AMD K3) and it reads the tape fine on an Adaptec 2940 Ultra/Ultra Wide. I have checked the scsi block size and they are 512 in both systems. Also the archive 8 matches in both systems. It is terminated properly and it is the only device on the chain. It will allow me to read a DDS-1 tape that it has written.
My plan was to set up the system remotely, restore the backup using the Lone Tar software, upgrade the O/S from 5.0.5 to 5.0.7 and setup any new hardware in the system and remove all the old hardware and drivers. It appears that with these problems my only solution is to connect the system to the network and move data across to the new system after all the programs are reinstalled. Could this problem be resolved by replacing the controllers with something new? Does anyone have any suggestions for a controller to replace these with, so that I can get this system finished?