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(?) Linux and SCSI tape drives

From Becca Putman

In your webpage, you said, "If you can't access your tape drive, try loading the st.o module."

I'm very new at this, so please bear with me... how do I load that module? I did a simple installation of RedHat 9(Shrike). When I installed my Adaptec aha-2940 card, RH saw it immediately. It also sees my tape drive (a DEC TZ87 - supposed to be the same as a Quantum DLT2000), but it doesn't load a driver for it. Suggestions?

(!) [Faber] Are you sure RH hasn't loaded a driver for you? Sounds like it did. Why do you say it didn't load the module?
Anywho, you can look at the list of loaded modules with 'lsmod' to see if it is loaded. To load a module, you can type "modprobe st" and the system will load the st.o modules and any dependencies.

(?) I created the tape with high density and 6250 blocksize. However, restore is complaining about a tape read error on first record. If I take out the blocksize argument, it says:

[root@tara tape]# restore -x -v -f /dev/st0 *
Verify tape and initialize maps
Input is from tape
restore: Tape block size (80) is not a multiple of dump block size
(1024)
(!) [K.-H] /dev/st0 rewinds automatically on closing of the filehandle. /dev/nst0 is the no-rewind version which will not rewind the tape automatically
This is valid for all commands using the /dev/[n]st0 icluding mt
(!) [Faber] Isn't this saying that you should be using 80 instead of 6250?
(!) [Ben] Probably not. I suspect that what it's seeing is a header that it doesn't understand, which happens to have "80" in the position where the block size would normally go.

(?) The tape was created with OpenVMS v6-something back in 1997. Please tell me there is some way to read it...? Pretty please? Pretty please with sugar on top?

(!) [Faber] Can anyone help the lass? I can't remember the last time I did a tape retore let alone doing one from an different OS (waitaminnit! can you restore a VMS tape to a un*x/Linux box?).
(!) [Ben] Erm, well... only if you wanted to make it into a VMS box. :) In short, no - at least as far as I know. You should be able to extract the tape contents, though - and I seem to remember that there's a VAX/VMS emulator available for Linux, so you might even be able to run what you extract.

(?) I found a free product called vmsbackup, which will take a tape made with VMS and extract it to a unix (read, Linux) box. It can be found at http://vms.process.com/ftp/vms-freeware/FREE-VMS, if anyone is interested.

Anyway, I've come to the realization that my tape has a bad block - right at the very front. sigh I tried to use mt to move the tape past it, but it appears that just before mt exits, it rewinds the tape. Real helpful.


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Published in issue 103 of Linux Gazette June 2004

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