I have an Exabyte EAgle TR-4i Ide tape drive installed in my
Linux box at work. When I visited the Exabyte website, I found a little information about recompiling the kernel for Ide tape drives. I performed this recompile and I thought things ran smoothly. I tested the kernel on floppy before installing and it worked fine. Next I watched it boot and saw that it found the hdd tape drive and then indicated:

hdd <-> ht0 (then a bunch of stats)

So I thought everything was fine. While trying to install
BRU, it asked for the device file /dev/st0 and I entered /dev/ht0 and it indicated that there was none. I then Quit the installation and searched for the drive.

Under /dev I did not find an ht0, but I found hdd, and I looked under /mnt (don't no if that matters) and did not find a /mnt/tape.

I'm I missing something? Exabyte made it seem that all you have to do is recompile to add the drive, do I need to do something else?

Thanks

Run this..
Run these commands:

depmod -a
insmod ide-tape

That should do it for you. I've got a major problem with my system in regards to an IDE-tape (Onstream I30) .

Every time I try and recompile the kernel gcc is bombing out. It's driving me crazy.

I hope that fixes your problem. Let me know.

ronballard,
What distro are you using?

rh 6.2 2.2/16 Why?

I know a fella who has the same rh 6.2 kernel 2.2.16 who had to download a ide kernel patch to get his ide Onstream 30 tape drive to work. Then he had to follow some instructions after the patch.

This is kernel 2.2.17

I tried the commands:
depmod -a
insmod ide-tape

in the /usr/src/linux directory and it said that it didn't exist.

I then went to the /usr/src/linux/modules directory and found the following...

NET_MISC_MODULES
NET_MODULES
dummy.o (what's this)
parport.o
parport_pc

Do I have to create a module, or is that what recompiling a kernel is all about?

Should I recompile with kernel 2.2.16?

I have the option of setting up a parallel port ditto 2Gb tape drive, but I would rather use the Exabyte eagle holds more data. (Thats why the partport.0 is there)

Thanks for all your help so far.

ronballard,
I asked what distro you were using becuase RH7 has a lot of problems with the compiler. What errors are you getting.

edati,
To get the ide-tape module you will need to compile the kernel with IDE tape support.

Good news: I downloaded kernel 2.2.16 and used the ide-patch found on Onstream's linux site. Got it working.

Bad news: 3com 3c905 card stopped working.

Two steps forward, one step back....

concerning the ide tape drive and the 3com 3c905 ethernet card. Could this be a IRQ conflict?

I used a admin tool in Caldera 2.3 called Coastool "kernel"
which allows a person to insmod modules and it was not allowing me to place the 3c90x.o module into the kernel.

I rebooted to the old 2.2.17 kernel without tape support and it allowed me to reinsert the module and bring the 3c905 card back.

I don't now about linux, but windows used to have problems with IRQ's. Is there a simple way to test for this?

Ed

I am going to try something different now. I spent 4 days working on putting a tape drive in and it still doesn't work the way I want it. Crash recovery is my major concern. I am going to get norton ghost 2001 which can Image the Linux file system and I am thinking of installing a Iomega 1GB Jaz drive with a scsi card for backing up ftp( I hope this isn't going to take me all week ). Oh well, I like challenges.

Thanks for your suggestions. I am learning a lot.

Ed