Tape drive problems

czarherr · 09-22-2004, 05:21 PM

I have a tape drive installed under Red Hat AS 2.1 that won't backup files. I run a

mt -f /dev/st0 status

and I get the correct tape info, and it is empty and BOT, but then i run

tar cf /dev/st0 archivename

and the tape lights blink and linux returns no error, but when i check the status again, nothing was writting to the tape at all. The model of tape drive is Qualstar RLS 4221 with AIT 3 drives.

michaelk · 09-22-2004, 06:19 PM

/dev/st0 will automatically cause the tape to rewind when tar finishes execution. If you do not want the tape to rewind use /dev/nst0. mt will not tell you how much data is on tape.

Go ahead and extract the file into another directory.
tar -xvf /dev/st0

czarherr · 09-22-2004, 07:29 PM

worked great, thanks