Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3242 mails)

[dmarkh@xxxxxxxxxx]

Robert Barish wrote:
> 
> Good Day All:
> I have installed a tape drive to perform backups.  When I go into /proc/ide,
> I find the tape drive labeled as hdb.   So I see the system is seeing the
> tape drive.

I'm not sure why your expecting hdb to be a tape drive. Ide tape drives
are usually
/dev/ht0 and /dev/ht1. Are you sure you don't have a hard drive at hdb?

> 
> Now my question is, what steps do i need to take to run the following
> command:  mke2fs -cv /dev/hdb  Now when I run the command I get the message:
> 
>            mke2fs 1.19, 13-Jul-2000 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09
>            dev/hdb is entire device, not just one partition!
>            Proceed anyway? (y,n) y
>            mke2fs: Device size reported to be zero.  Invalid partition
>            specified, or partition table wasn't reread after running fdisk,
>            due to a modified partition being busy and in use.  You may need
>            to reboot to re-read your partition table.
> 
> And when I run: fdisk /dev/hdb I get the message:
>             Unable to read /dev/hdb
> So how can I get this to work?  I thought the process would be just like
> anding another hard drive!
> 
> Also how do I configure the tape drive to be mounted everytime the system
> boots.  I am assuming I have to modify /etc/fstab with something like
> 
>          /dev/hdb      /mnt/tape   ext2  defaults 1 1
> [This is after I create a mount point by cd /mnt, mkdir tape]
>

Again I don't understand why you expect to be able to mount a tape
drive. I've used
many different types and have never had to or even tried to mount one. I
don't think
your gonna have any luck with this. Your tape drive should be /dev/ht0.
You should
be able to access it with programs such as mt, tar, dump, etc.... For
instance try
to do "mt -f /dev/ht0 rewind" or "tar -zcvf /dev/ht0 /somedir"

Regards
Mark 
> Is this correct?
> 

-- 
Mark Hounschell
dmarkh@xxxxxxxxxx