sata and ide tape drives

glockster · 08-08-2005, 11:30 PM

I need some help gentlemen and ladies. I have a Dell SC420 with sata boot drives. So far everthing is working fine except for the tape drive. So I have tried "modprobe" type command and it made my tape drive my boot drive and that is not what I wanted. Can I get some guidance?

Dell SC420
FC3 (patched with yum)
2 SATA drives (working fine)
1 IDE Travan 20/40 GB

Any other info I will supply. Thanks in advance.

fouldsy · 08-09-2005, 11:12 AM

If you work out what device it is, eg. /dev/hdb1 or whatever, add

Code:

ide-scsi=/dev/hdb1

to your boot parameters. The Travan 20 drives are delightful under Linux... I spent hours trying to get one going in an OpenExchange server and finally ended up writing a script that simply tarred all the files I wanted, copied to tape directly using something like:

Code:

 tar cvf /dev/nst0 /var/opt/comfire/filespool

which wasn't very elegant, but worked. Checked dmesg to see what your device gets recognised as, but it should think it's a SCSI device to work properly, hence needing to add ide-scsi at boot

glockster · 08-09-2005, 11:25 AM

Thanks for you input. I will give that try tonight when I get to the house.

glockster · 08-09-2005, 11:29 AM

Can I tell it to be say sb1 or sb2 or st1 or st2? Or does it automatically assign?

fouldsy · 08-09-2005, 11:38 AM

It will assign it automatically, and should pop up during boot, so check the output of dmesg. It will say which device it has found, the model name + number, and the device allocation. But, usually it will be the first SCSi device, 0, so try nst0 (honestly don't know what nst means...)

glockster · 08-09-2005, 08:08 PM

Well this entry "ide-scsi=/dev/hdb" worked fine in the grub.conf. I was affraid it was going to do the same that that modprobe did. Thanks for the help and guidance.

fouldsy · 08-10-2005, 06:00 AM

No problem, glad it booted up fine. So you got the drive recognised and functioning ok? Maybe the device drivers have improved since I tried a Travan drive!

glockster · 08-10-2005, 08:05 AM

Yea once I added the entry to the grub.conf file I rebooted and then checked the hardware and it did say st0 instead of hdb. THen I did a sample backup and all is good. Thanks again.

fouldsy · 08-10-2005, 08:08 AM

No problem, glad it was that easy!