Am having trouble using a tape drive:

Tape is Seagate TapeStor Travan on ATAPI i/face (2nd mas.)

O/S is Corel Linux (Debian kern v.2.2.12)

On boot O/S recognises tape on 2nd mas. = /dev/hdc

Have created symlink /dev/tape --> /dev/hdc

When using mt to (eg) rewind tape, get 'mt: /dev/tape is not a character special file' - I know, it's block special!

What am I doing wrong? Can I just make /dev/hdc character special with mkdev?

Pls help!

Update:

I've replaced the /dev/hdc block special with a character special using 'mknod hdc c 22 0'

Now when I try 'mt rewind' I get 'Operation not supported by device'

Any thoughts?

I don't know if I even got the right device since I guessed at using '0' to indicate channel master after not being able to find anything on device numbers.

With the help of this and other formums, I was !finally! able to get my Seagate STT3401A Travan IDE tape drive working under:
SuSE 8.2 (kernel 2.4.22). I believe that this solution will work for other distros (RedHat) and kernels based on my research. The trick is: Treat it like a SCSI drive, even though it is NOT one. Yep, not obvious to this "module newbie", but even Seagate's web site implies this, see:
http://www.seagate.com/support/tape/...iag.html#linux
So here is what I did (some steps may be extraneous):
1) If you are not compiling your kernel then skip step 2.
2) If you are compiling your kernel, compile in the SCSI base statically and the SCSI tape as a module. Also compile in the ATAPI tape as a module. This driver should work (but it doesn't) so I do this on principal and as a protest. Install kernel, modules, set boot loader, and reboot.
3) rmmod ide-tape (the kernel will default to this (possibly) broken driver)
4) rmmod ide-scsi (just to make sure)
5) modprobe ide-scsi
6) hwinfo --scsi (to check that the tape drive has the scsi driver loaded)
Step 6 will get you the device name (/dev/st0 on mine). However, I have "read" that it is wise to instead use /dev/nst0 for backup commands. This device (alias) will not not rewind the tape and overwrite the begining on large backups. Now you can do stuff like:
mt -f /dev/nst0 status
mt -f /dev/nst0 rewind (yes, it will rewind like this)
tar cvf /dev/nst0 .

Hope this saves someone the time that I lost "spinning my wheels"...
- Wes

I tried this and got this at step 4:
ERROR: Module ide_scsi does not exist in /proc/modules