Problem with tape drive in Linux.

Hi,

I've a problem with my tape drive on a Linux machine. It was working fine
last summer but I've not used it in a while. --Note that the drive appears
to work fine, by this I mean when I insert a tape (or boot the machine with
a tape in the drive) the tape drive spools the tape and makes the usual
'I'm doing something with this tape' noise. When I had a faulty tape drive
(notorious with HP 20 GB tape drives) this did not happen.

The tape drive is a HP Colorado 20GB Internal IDE drive and I have it setup
using scsi emulation. My Linux Kernel version is 2.4.7-10.

The configuration I've used to setup the tape drive is as follows:

To File: /boot/grub/grub.conf
Added the line "hdd=ide-scsi" to the kernel line EG.
kernel /vmlinux-.... root=/dev/hda2 hdd=ide-scsi

To File: /etc/rc.d/rc.local
Added the following line:
modprobe ide-scsi

But when I use tar to create an archive on the tape like this:

tar -cvpf /dev/st0 /home/ms/notes/*

I get given a file listing followed by this error:

tar: /dev/st0: Wrote only 0 of 10240 bytes
tar: error is not recoverable: exiting now

I did a web search on this kind of problem and found the suggestion to
retension the tape. So I used the mt program (downloaded and installed the
RPM first) to do this.

mt -f /dev/st0 retension

Now I get a serious error:

/dev/st0: Input/output error
mt: The device is offline (not powered on, no tape?).

Can anyone help me sort this out please. Many thanks and regards,

..matthew


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