System Hangs When Restoring from SCSI Tape Drive

 Last reviewed: November 22, 1994
Article ID: Q85001
The information in this article applies to:
  • Microsoft Windows operating system versions 3.1, 3.11
  • Microsoft Windows for Workgroups versions 3.1, 3.11

SUMMARY

If you are restoring data from an SCSI tape drive to an SCSI hard drive using Sytos Plus tape backup software version 2.0 and you have SMARTDrive version 4.0 configured for Write Behind caching, your system may hang after displaying the following error message: 

   A serious disk error has occurred on drive x: press R for retry.
SMARTDrive (SMARTDRV.EXE) version 4.0 is included with Windows 3.1.

To correct this problem, reconfigure SMARTDrive to perform read caching only.

MORE INFORMATION

SMARTDrive version 4.0 is trying to write to the SCSI fixed disk when it detects a timer tick. At the same time, the SCSI tape drive restore program is in the middle of communicating with the SCSI tape drive. This confuses the restore program and the SCSI software because the SCSI bus gets told to do something else while it is in the middle of a tape access command.

At this point, the system is locked up. Pressing the R key works correctly because the SCSI bus is busy with the TAPE command which is also hung due to the SMARTDrive drive access to the SCSI fixed disk.

KBCategory: kbhw kberrmsg kb3rdparty
KBSubcategory: wfw win31 winmem wfwg
Additional reference words: 3.10 3.11 ADAPTEC 1522 SCSI controller 3rdparty
err msg

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Last reviewed: November 22, 1994
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