[Gllug] Tape drive

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Wed, 2006-04-12 at 21:47 +0100, Adrian McMenamin wrote:
> Not sure how to do this because I am not sure what are the right things
> to ask google (the obvious stuff like "how do I detect my DDS2 drive in
> linux" and similar variants don't seem to work). So here goes...
> 
> Have an ancient hunk of iron which is a very noisy dual pentium 2/333
> box of little use. But it does have a HP SCSI DDS2 tape drive that I'd
> like to play with.
> 
> I have now installed ubuntu on this thing and it doesn't seem to
> acknowledge the existence of the two devices on the second scsi card (ie
> the cdrom and the tape drive) though the hard disks - all on scsi0 are
> seen.
> 
> Of course I installed ubuntu from the cdrom and tape drive certainly
> seems alive when I put a tape in.
> 
> How do I detect/configure these things. What should I look for...

You need to have the st module loaded, or compiled in. You should get
something like:-


scsi1 : Adaptec AIC7XXX EISA/VLB/PCI SCSI HBA DRIVER, Rev 7.0
        <Adaptec 2940 Ultra SCSI adapter>
        aic7880: Ultra Single Channel A, SCSI Id=7, 16/253 SCBs

  Vendor: HP        Model: C1557A            Rev: U610
  Type:   Sequential-Access                  ANSI SCSI revision: 02
 target1:0:5: Beginning Domain Validation
 target1:0:5: FAST-10 SCSI 10.0 MB/s ST (100 ns, offset 15)
 target1:0:5: Domain Validation skipping write tests
 target1:0:5: Ending Domain Validation
  Vendor: HP        Model: C1557A            Rev: U610
  Type:   Medium Changer                     ANSI SCSI revision: 02
 target1:0:5: FAST-10 SCSI 10.0 MB/s ST (100 ns, offset 15)
st: Version 20050830, fixed bufsize 32768, s/g segs 256
st 1:0:5:0: Attached scsi tape st0<4>st0: try direct i/o: yes (alignment 512 B), max page reachable by HBA 1048575

when you boot the machine. Equally, it should be there if you
cat /proc/scsi/scsi:-

Host: scsi1 Channel: 00 Id: 05 Lun: 00
  Vendor: HP       Model: C1557A           Rev: U610
  Type:   Sequential-Access                ANSI SCSI revision: 02


Note the "Sequential Access" bit - disks should all show up as "Direct
Access". Finally, you should be able do do stuff with mt, even when
there's no tape in the drive:-

# mt -f /dev/st0 datcompression
Compression on.
Compression capable.
Decompression capable.
mt: /dev/st0: No medium found


HTH,

Mike


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