Yay!!! I'm reading and writing!!! Many thanks to (in no particular order): Seth Mos, Robert Wideman, Matt Domsch and Ashley from the amanda lists...
I got it working by using ide-scsi, and the following lilo.conf entry: append="/dev/ht0=ide-scsi" and... Then put this in /etc/rc.d/rc.local: rmmod ide-tape modprobe ide-scsi hdparm -d0 /dev/hdd mt -f /dev/st0 stoptions no-blklimits Ok... Now the reason I was having trouble getting it to automagically detect the ide-cum-scsi drive was because the ide-tape stuff was compiled into the kernel, rather than being a module. this meant that it couldn't rmmod ide-tape :o( . recompiled the kernel with ide-tape as a module, and it's all happy now. Cheers! Chris Herrmann Far Edge Technology p. 02 99553640 f. 02 99547994 m. 0403 393309 http://www.faredge.com.au