detecting IDE tape drive

heramboak · 11-14-2005, 06:56 PM

hi,

am using SuSE 9.3 professional and DELL Travan 40GB IDE tape drive.

Am not able to detect the tape drive even after rebooting the systesm.

Whenever I give

mt -f /dev/rmt0 status
it says
mt: /dev/rmt0: No such file or directory

pls help..

regards,
Heramb

born4linux · 11-14-2005, 07:28 PM

run dmesg | less and look for the tape drive entry. might be set as a SCSI device.

heramboak · 11-14-2005, 07:31 PM

i was using /dev/st0 which is wrong. After using
mt -f /dev/ht0 it started working fine.

Can anybody tell me what is the command and syntax for taking full system level backup in SuSE 9.3 professional Linux?? I am looking for command similar to ufsdump in that of Solaris. Please help

regds
Heramb

shredmaster · 12-13-2005, 04:32 AM

I'm having a very similar problem except i cannot get the drive to modprobe using 'modprobe ide-tape'

To do a tape backup you can use the command tar -cvf /dev/whateverdevice /directory/backupsdirectory

sharonenoch · 01-27-2006, 07:42 AM

try modprobe ide-iscsi. i guess it should work. Since i am working on Fedora core 3 i am not too sure
here the tape drive shows up as /dev/st0
and doing a mt -f /dev/st0 status will giev u more information

tongro · 01-28-2006, 02:36 PM

Yes, ide-scsi and /dev/st0 should work.

However, does anybody know how what needs to be done so that we don't need to do "modprobe ide-scsi" every time? I've heard it said that you just have to add "hdb=ide-scsi" (hdb being the 2nd IDE drive) to the kernel startup arguments (in /boot/grub/menu.lst), but that doesn't work for me. Any ideas anybody?

Thanks.

sharonenoch · 01-30-2006, 04:50 AM

I had to add the "hdc=ide-scsi" to the grub.conf and in /etc/rc.local
a added a line "modprobe ide-scsi"
by this i got it to work
but the easier way is trying to edit the /etc/modprobe.conf and adding the specified module there..
but i am not sure what ot give there

i just know that
"alias ........... ide-scsi"

the ... has to be filled in by the alias name

sharonenoch · 01-30-2006, 09:06 AM

tongro

i guess u will be able to help me on this too.. since i am also using a tape drive and i am trying to set the block size but to no avail...
i am using the mt command to do it
like

Code:

mt setblk 0

could u give me an insight on this

tongro · 01-30-2006, 09:20 AM

I don't know that you need to set the block size at all. I have been using tar to read/write the tape and have had no block-size issues. However, I'm now changing over to cpio (for better fault-tolerance) which allows you to set the block size to 5120 bytes instead of 512.

sharonenoch · 01-30-2006, 09:29 AM

i am able to access using the cpio command but not able to use the tar command it says i/o error
do u know why is this

sharonenoch · 01-30-2006, 09:31 AM

check this link it will give a detailed description of what all i tried to do to make the tar command to work... but still i am not able to get it to work

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=408535

sharonenoch · 01-30-2006, 09:34 AM

one more thing what was the synatx of the command u used to set the block size using the cpio command

tongro · 01-30-2006, 09:35 AM

Apparently tar has a -b option which allows you to set the block size to a multiple of 512 bytes. For example -b 10 sets the block size to 5120.

cpio uses -B to set block size to 5120.