[newbie] How do I mount an IDE Tape drive?

[Don Allen]

Hi All,

I am running Mandrake Air 7.0 on an AMD 233 Mhz system using
96 megs of ram. The install went well, and it saw all my DOS
partitions for Windoze and listed them on the desktop, along
with the floppy and CDROM drives.

However, there is no entry in fstab for my IDE-ATAPI AIWA tape
drive.

Lothar minimally sees it as /dev/hdd (2nd device on the secondary
IDE channel). I've tried manually installing it through linuxconf applet
but I'm either not doing it right, or don't have all the params
correct. I can't get Linux to recognize or initialize the drive.

Any help on this would be appreciated. It's my intent to use the
tape drive for backups. The drive works flawlessly on the Windoze
side.

Regards,

Don


---

"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God" - Thomas Jefferson

Re: [newbie] How do I mount an IDE Tape drive?

[Don Allen]

At 01:33 PM 3/27/00 -0800, Sevatio Octavio wrote:

You don't have to mount an IDE tape
drive. As long as your system recognizes the tape drive you can
just run taper -T ide.

Ok, that worked and it recognized the tape drive. Is there any

better tape backup software for Linux?

Taper crapped out on me several times on a small backup. I tried
setting the preferences, but found it difficult at best, to
ascertain
which were the default values and which were the altered values. It
does not provide a whole lot of useful information on which column
is which, ie. which are the default and which are the altered, when
you use the cursor keys to highlight a column. Hitting the
left/right
cursor keys only does a screen anomaly which throws characters
out of the field, at least on _my_ system (Kde desktop, 800 x 600)

For example - 

Have fast fsf - no yes
Can seek -
no yes
Can fsr -
no yes 

After an error-ridden attempt at a backup supposedly
succeeded,
the restore module would not identify the backup as a taper 
archive.

Any suggestions on better tape backup software that anyone else
is using?

Regards and thanks,

Don


---

Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God - Thomas
Jefferson