Hello,


I need to create a mount point for a tape device /Dev/IBMtape0.

When i issue df -h/df -k i want to see tape device mount point.

As it is a sequential device creating mount point is not same as creating mount point for other devices such as CD-ROM.


Please do the needful.

Hi there.

As far as I know there is no way to do this. You touched on the fact that this is a sequential access device, and my understanding is that "mounting" only works for random access devices.

You can control the tape drive with the mt command, and can write to & read from it with many commands, including tar, cpio & dd, and may other specialized backup tools.

Hi ..


There is way to create mount point for tape device as it is a character device i think minor and major number needs
to be mentioned but i do not know exactly how to do it.

Thanks in advance..

Hi again,

A few quick comments:
* Just for clarify, let's talk some terminology first. A mount point is just a directory, so to "create a mount point" you just need to create a directory where you want to mount something (using the mkdir command). Presumably the real question is thus not how to create the mount point, but how to mount the tape drive.
* If the device file (presumably /dev/IBMtape0, with lower case "d") exists, it already has a major and minor number. Run "ls -l /dev/IBMtape0" to find it. Please post the output if you want an explanation of what you're looking at.
* The type of device (character or block) does not determine whether it can be mounted. Many character devices (like /dev/tty*, /dev/pts*, /dev/zero, /dev/random and even a hard drive (not partition) like /dev/sda) can not be mounted.
* For a device to be mounted, you must be able to create a file system on it, and I am not aware of any file system type that works on sequential devices. There might be something out there that I have not come across, though.

Regards,

Clifford

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi ...

crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 250, 0 Jul 9 16:44 /dev/IBMtape0

This is the output returned...

Thanks......

You can't mount a tape drive like you do a CD/DVD/hard drive. Tape devices are sequential, period...you cannot access them like you would a non-sequential device. Don't know what you heard, or where, but cliffordw gave you the right answer, but you apparently don't believe us.

Hope this 'does the needful'

Hi again,

Here's a quick explanation of the key things you see in the "ls -l" output as promised:

Regards,

Clifford

1 members found this post helpful.