Accessing HP Colorado 5gig IDE Tape drive

[Floppyman]

Hi all,

I'm having trouble accessing a IDE HP 5gig Colorado tape drive using Mandrake 9.1. Supposedly it is identified as /dev/hdc according to Harddrake. I tried using Ktape that comes with KDE, but it could not access the drive. I tried mounting it but that also did not work (then again I read somehwere that tape drives aren't mounted). I loaded the ide-tape module and that still didn't help. Could anyone tell me how I would access this drive, and also what would be some good backup software? Thanks in advance.

[DerekKraan]

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/archive/18/2003/07/1/68926

That page might be of help to you. It's about an Onstream IDE Tape device, but the same principles should apply here as well.

[Floppyman]

Thanks for the reply. I tried going to that site and following those instructions, but I'm still having trouble.

I opened up the lilo.conf file in /etc and added

append="hdc=ide-scsi" to emulate the IDE tape drive as SCSI.

I also opened up the modules file and added the "st" module so it would load a boot time

I rebooted and logged on as root. I still cannot access the tape drive. a dmesg | grep tape/st0 will not work. A mount /dev/st0 will not work. The mt command will not work at all.

However a dmesg | grep hdc will work and identify the tape drive. I have a IDE cd burner that is emulated as SCSI and that IS working fine. When I do a dmesg | grep hda I get information about the burner including a Kernel command line saying basically that the drive is emulated at ide-scsi. I DO NOT get this when I do a dmesg to the tape drive. Also when doing lsmod, it looks like the st module is unused. Am I missing something somewhere? Thanks again.

[DerekKraan]

I have to admit that I don't really use a tape drive...and never have. That was just the results of a google search. :P

[Floppyman]

Thanks again for the reply.

Well I think I probably made a mistake:

I had two append lines in my lilo.conf

Now I have one that looks like this:

append="hda=ide-scsi hdc=ide-scsi"

However I still have the same problems. There must be a file that I'm not editing that needs to be edited-- probably something to with that kernel command line that I'm getting when I do dmesg | grep hda

Anyone else have any ideas?

[Floppyman]

Does anyone have any ideas on this? I'm stumped. TIA.

[mike8706]

I have the same tape drive and had the same problem. Place a tape in the drive and try "mt -f /dev/ht0 status" without the quotes. It should show the status of the drive. Then if there are no errors try "mt -f /dev/ht0 erase" (Try that on a blank tape only! Unless you want to erase a tape).

If none of that works use different numbers in /dev/ht(#). It took me almost 2 months to realize that I was trying to access the wrong drive. And that you cannot "mount" a tape! Tell me if it works or not.