Re: Problem with tape drive in Linux.

It's making noises? Yes. I'd use mt (and blast it with a can of air too).
Check the cables too. It seems to sound like the drive has gone south so if
you have a spare box you might try a swap and if that doesn't work perhaps
an RMA?

"Matthew Stanfield" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> 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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