[flexbackup-help] IDE tape drive problem

[Toby Deitrich]

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