Re: Tape Drive With Linux.

Mike Dresser wrote:
> 
> > So I discovered; I'm on drive number two, the first died within my two year
> > warranty and was replaced (by next day delivery) free.
> 
> I've got one up on that!
> 
> I've got _replacements_ that are out of the "new" two year warranty.
> Some of these drives have been replaced 2-3 times in the last 2 years.
> All but one has failed, out of about 12.  Been replacing them with the
> RMA's, and with DDS-4 tape drives.
> 
> HP has been sending me the 20gb drives, I take it the 14's had major
> problems.  Or they ran out.  Probably both.

It sounds like I should be expecting more problems then. The 'new' one is
only 8 weeks old. No wonder they offered to send me a new one so quickly,
I'd barely mentioned the broken drive and found myself giving address
details for a new one to be sent out.


> > Mine is also IDE and I've read about the scsi emulation (I have 2.4.7-10).
> > What do you mean by "tar/whatever you want."? Do I not have to use fdisk to
> > access the drive?
> 
> Fdisk?  Ftape?  You can write to it just like a file.  So you could use
> amanda, tar, taper, cpio, dd, insert_utility_here.  Just tell it to write
> to /dev/st0, or if you want non-rewinding, /dev/nst0.  You don't need to
> format or partition the tape.

I mean, of course, 'ftape' not the 'DOS' disk partitioning utility 'fdisk'.
When doing a 'full' system backup would you just create one large tar file
writing it directly to /dev/st0? I haven't quite got to grips with the
Linux/Unix way of doing things yet.

Thanks again for your help.

Regards,

..matthew
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