[flexbackup-help] IDE tape drive problem

[Toby D. <to...@so...>]

Hi all-
 
I am a Linux newbie, so please forgive my ignorance.  I have an i586 box
running SuSE Linux 9.0 and it has a Seagate STT3401A IDE tape drive.  I
tried using tar, and I got I/O errors, and after fishing around on
Google I found out that the ide-tape module doesn't work, but the
ide-scsi does.  Ok, installed that (did rmmod and modprobe) and now I
can tar to/from the tape drive.  I can also run Taper, but I don't much
like the interface, and for some reason I can't get Taper to execute via
cron.  I'd rather use flexbackup anyway, because it seems
cleaner/better.  However.
 
Now that I have the ide-scsi module installed, flexbackup tries to do a
mt -f /dev/nst0 setblk and defblksize and gets an I/O error and fails.
This happens even if I do flexbackup -test-tape-drive.  Presumably
because my tape drive isn't really a SCSI drive. ?  
 
I read the flexbackup FAQ and tried setting $mt{'setblk'} = '' or
$mt{'setblk'} = 'nop' but it doesn't make any difference, I still get
the error. I tried the -ignore-errors switch but it still failed.
 
Has anyone out there been able to use and IDE tape drive with
flexbackup?  I'd greatly appreciate any help.
 
Next time, I'm buying a SCSI tape drive!
 
Thanks,
Toby