Tape drive's there but not there.
I'm having a few interesting incidents with my tape drive, and am trying to figure out how to get it working. It's a 4GB Travan tape drive from Seagate, and it's being picked up correctly (or seems to). It sits in the /dev/hdc spot and is recognized as a "CONNER CTT8000-A, ATAPI TAPE drive", as shown in /var/log/dmesg. The drive itself is working great, but yet when I try to do anything with it (with a tape in it), it will ls as /dev/ht0 or /dev/ht1, but will say "device does not exist" when I try to use cat or another command on it. Using tar either seems to dump everything at ~ or /dev/user (both are about the same, aren't they?) to stdout, which puts garbage on the screen and drives the system bell crazy. When I do seem to hit on the right sequence for tar, I, again, get "/dev/ht0: device does not exist". What do I need to fix and how do I fix it? Most of it may be user error, as the manual for tar is very unclear. To back up my home directory, what is the exact command I need? The manual seems to suggest something like tar --create input output which would translate to tar --create ~ /dev/ht0 (this dumps the garbage), but I have also tried stuff like tar -cf /home/user /dev/ht0 as -f is force and -c is create (--create) and you can combine options when using short options. Am I still doing it wrong?
What should my /etc/default/tar file look like? I made a new file and stuck an entry in. It looks something like this:
archive0=/dev/ht0 10 4194304
I believe it is archive number = /dev entry, size of the blocks (in sets of 512 bytes) and then total number of 512-byte sets.
Last edited by lectraplayer; 09-04-2006 at 08:43 PM.
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