Hello everyone. I'm running Solaris 8 on a SPARC Sun Blade 1500 box. My tape drive doesn't work, and going into OpenBoot I can't see the drive. I have a HP C5686B tape drive connected to a LSI Logic SCSI card (8751SPE), which is not recognized in OpenBoot with the probe-scsi-all command. In fact, no output at all shows with this command. I have an IDE hard drive and CD-ROM that are detected with probe-ide and show-disks -the output from that being:
a). /pci@1e,600000/ide@d/cdrom
b). /pci@1e,600000/ide@d/disk
Shouldn't there be a line here for the scsi?

With the show-devs command I can see the line:
/pci@1e,600000/scsi@2

Shouldn't OpenBoot detect the tape drive and/or scsi card, or do I need to manually type something in?

Are the cdrom and disk on the same scsi card as the tape drive? Assuming you're using the standard Blade 1500 setup and the cdrom/disk are not scsi, it doesn't surprise me at all that OpenBoot doesn't see the scsi card. Are you attempting to boot from tape? The OS should pick up the scsi card, but if you're trying to install it from tape that is obviously of no help

Thanks Brian. I inferred from your reply that a tape drive doesn't necessarily have to be seen in OpenBoot to function normally, so I altered my way of approaching the matter and changed the SCSI cable (the only scsi device -as the setup is the standard Blade Server configuration) and the tape drive was then seen in Solaris. I can now back-up a tape. I assume that the OpenBoot is need of some scsi element as the probe-scsi-all command continues to provide no output. Isn't that correct?

OpenBoot is fairly limited. There's not room for tons of hardware support, and it obviously isn't something you can just load drivers into, so it won't show what it doesn't know. All it needs to do is get the system booted. Solaris on the other hand, is continually updated with new drivers, etc.

Thanks again Brian.

That is not really correct though. If you don't see the scsi tape drive at the obp, solaris will not see it. You probably have an external scsi tape drive connected to a scsi card.

You will not see it with probe-scsi but you should see it with probe-scsi-all.

If you don't, check the target id of the tape drive and the pins in the scsi cable.

If you see it at the obp, then solaris will build the entries in /dev/rmt. The command devfsadm would build the entry automatically but it will never work if the hardware does not see it.

Do you know if this is a supported device? It may not be

Nope, it is correct, the obp has not every driver built-in.

I agree with that but when I use my "sun" (really hp) tape drive, it is recognized at the obp with probe-scsi-all. If i don't see it, usually that means that the scsi cable is loose, the pins are bent or the target id of the device is the same as another device.

That is why I was asking if the device was supported, meaning that solaris may not recognize the device due to the lack of drivers for it.

Your sunblade 1500 is fairly new, so I would guess that the version of the obp is fairly new. Have you tried to add perhaps another device to your scsi card? If you don't see the other device (let's say one of those old unipacks from sun), perhaps the scsi card itself is not recognized or simply it has gone bad. Or have you tried to connect that same tape drive to another machine to see if the other machine sees the tape drive? That way, you can try to narrow it down to one component. I can append from work the output of my probe-scsi-all and show-devs if it helps you.

Javier, there is no need to investigate further, according to the OP, the problem has already been solved.

Brian was quite correct, as my tape drive started functioning normally after I changed-out the SCSI cable. The drive could then be detected in Solaris 8 with iostat -En, despite not being detected in OpenBoot.
Thanks guys for your input.

good to know. i tried today and all the tape drives that I have were recognized by the obp. i tried an hp, an internal exabyte and one more that I had laying around. I guess we all learn something new every day.
I know i did. later.