Hi all. I have a Dell Powervault 112LT SCSI tape drive connected to my Linux box, and I am trying to back up to tape but for some reason I'm running into some problems...

I did the following: less /proc/scsi/scsi and the tape device is listed as an attached device. The Id is 14.

I did an lsmod, and sd_mod, and scsi_mod were listed, but no st. I searched the drivers and st.o is listed in /usr/lib/2.4.18-3/kernel/driver/.

However when I run mt -f /dev/st0 status I get a "no such device" message. When I try to get just a table of contents for the tape with tar -tvf /dev/st0 I get "Cannot open, no such device".

Do I have to do anything like make the device, install anything in particular, etc? I just connected the tape drive to the server, and it was detected during bootup from the get go ...

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. This is urgent ...

Ok so I can finally see my tape drive, but I am having problems... any advice greatly appreciated...

tar -cvf /dev/st0 /test

This iterates whats in the test directory, and I am not given any error messages. However when I try to run either of the following commands:

tar -tvf /dev/st0
tar -xvf /dev/st0

I get the following:

tar: this does not look like a tar archive
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.

Any ideas? Thanks.

Dear Complus,

I got the same problem like yours.
My RedHat 6.2 runs on a Compaq box with a HP DDS4 tape unit.

Would you please told me how to "see" your tape device ?

thanx !

Jackson

This might sound really stupid, but I thought I'd post it just in case! I know some tape drives don't rewind when you've written/read from the tape, I think it depends on what device you use to access the tape drive (on the machine I had it was something like /dev/st0 or /dev/nst0 for rewinding and non-rewinding.) Did the tape rewind before you tried to re-read from it?

It works serval times 2 weeks ago that I tar some folders to /dev/st0, but after that, I got error message like :

[root]# tar -tvf /dev/st0
tar: /dev/st0: Cannot open: No such device
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

and I could not find "st0" if I used "dmesg" to check system message

But I moved the DPT scsi card and HP SureStore DDS tape unit to another RedHat 6.2 running MRTG, the tape unit works perfectly.

What is missing in my first RedHat ( hosting Oracle DB ) ?

Your comment and suggestion will be very welcome !

Jackson

Hi,

I'm unable to see the tapedrive in Linux AS 2.1.

tapeinfo -f /dev/st0
cannot open SCSI device '/dev/st0' - No such device

The hardware boot recognizes the Tape drive but linux not.


any sugestions to solve this problem?

Regards
JF