Tape drive problems in 10.4.10

Whitehill

Whitehill

Registered
Not too long ago I received an announcement from the Tolis Group, the maker of BRU backup software. Some excerpts ...
Since the release of 10.4.10, there are a number of issues that have surfaced with writing to tape and disk devices. For this reason, 10.4.10 is not compatible with tape devices connected to Mac OS X 10.4.10 via SCSI, FireWire, USB, SAS, or Fibre-Channel.

This is not a BRU Server software problem, but rather an Apple Mac OS X problem when using any type of software that communicates with tape devices.
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Well, that shuts me down. More ...
To resolve this issue, we strongly suggest that you downgrade to 10.4.8, as 10.4.9 has been known to exhibit the same type of symptoms.

We apologize that we did not make the announcement sooner, however, we believed that 10.4.11, which fixes this problem, would be released much sooner than now. As of this announcement, 10.4.11 has yet to be released, nor has there been an announcement for its expected release date.
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Does anyone know what this is about? Is it a real problem? When might it be fixed?
 
What is has to with is the maker of the Tape Drive is probably using an older chip-set the can not deal with modern connection code that Apple updated.

This is only a guess.
 
Which item are you talking about with the phrase the Tape Drive? The Tolis memo lumps together all drives of all known connection methods. Did Apple's changes render all these devices useless?
 
No, ANY external device had a small chip in it to go across the cables.
This chip has been upgraded over the last year in a lot of devices.

Disconnect the drive, then restart the Mac by resetting your PRAM.

when you reset the Pram, make sure you don't have any external devices connect to the Mac at this time.
 
Now I'm more confused than ever. My machine is a PowerMac G5, vintage of 12/2005. My tape drive is an Exabyte VXA-2 (firewire), a little older. My hardware has not changed nor been upgraded during the past two years. I have kept MacOSX up to date and am now running 10.4.10. The log shows
10.4.8 installed 2006-10-20
10.4.9 installed 2007-04-02
10.4.10 installed 2007-07-31​

I usually backup to a disk. The last tape backup was 2006-11-26, so it was under 10.4.8, before the issue that Tolis reports.

I received the Tolis memo on 10/23 and have NOT verified it personally. For all I know, everything still works fine - perhaps Tolis was just warning me about a worst case scenario. I posted the issue to the forum to see if others had noticed the problem. So ...

What does the PRAM on my old computer have to do with the new software that talks to my old tape drive?
 
Pram store mundane hardware settings on a chip (for future use). Resetting it can help with connection to third party devices by setting the USB/Firewire ports to factory settings.
 
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