News Group Posts

Linux ide tape drive name /dev/ht0

Subject: Re: Debian IDE Tape Drive
From: John-Paul Stewart <jpstewart@sympatico.ca>
Date: Fri, Feb 14, 2003 7:13 PM

Michael Robertson wrote:
> 
> Godwin Stewart wrote:
> 
> > /dev/st* maybe? I could be wrong...
> 
> I checked the kern.log file.  I have found that the device name is
> /dev/hdd.

Nooo!!  That won't work.  

If the device is installed as a secondary master, the kernel
will initially spit out some message pertaining to /dev/hdd
and you can use /dev/hdd as a parameter to 'hdparm' to turn
on/off DMA, etc.  But /dev/hdd is a block device for
reading/writing to hard drives.  You cannot talk to your
tape that way...it's also known as /dev/ht0 (assuming its
the first or only tape drive in the system).  /dev/ht0 is
what you need to use.  (Unless it's been setup with IDE-SCSI
emulation, in which /dev/st0 is what you need.)

On my system, where the tape drive is the secondary master,
'dmesg | grep hdc' shows (in part) the following:

hdc: Seagate STT20000A, ATAPI TAPE drive
ide-tape: hdc <-> ht0: Seagate STT20000A rev 8A51

Notice the message from ide-tape showing that hdc is
associated with ht0.  Try 'dmesg | grep hdd' on your own
system.  Be aware that you may need to manually 'modprobe
ide-tape' first, and/or add:

alias char-major-37 ide-tape

to /etc/modules.conf for automatic loading of the ide-tape
module.
 

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