Re: [flexbackup-help] IDE tape drive problem

[Roger P. <rp...@pr...>]

On Wed, 11 Feb 2004 16:55:54 -0500
"Toby Deitrich" <to...@so...> wrote:

> 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
>  
> 


I'm using a Seagate ST20000A drive, and had the same problems, try
setting differnt block sizes, I use $blksize=32, $mt_blksize=0
successfully. Use the"-test-tape-drive" option until you find the correct
one.  Also, ensure you have the latest flexbackup, 1.2.1
from http://flexbackup.sourceforge.net/




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