[NTLUG:Discuss] Tape Backup Question

[George E. Lass]

I ran into what might be a similar situation last night while installing
a linux based "server" for a friend's MAC.  He had an old Iomega Ditto
drive and an accelerator card (really just an ISA floppy drive
controller).

I don't know if the Easy 800 uses an accelerator, but I'll continue
anyway.....

For some odd reason his PCI PnP bios decided to change interrupt
assignments
on his PCI cards, and assigned IRQ 9 (which was strapped on the
accelerator)
to his NIC.  When I told the bios to reserve IRQ 9 for ISA, it then took
IRQ 4
(which was strapped on the internal ISA modem on the server). I finally
disabled
serial port 1 in the bios and it assigned IRQ 3 to the NIC and every
thing 
then worked OK.

As I recall, (it was a long night, so my recollections may not be all
that good),
I received a No Such Device error when I tried mt -f /dev/ftape status
command.
I also found the following error in /var/log/messages:

Aug 17 20:05:10 kevin-server kernel: [003]    fdc-io.c
(fdc_grab_irq_and_dma) - Unable to grab IRQ9 for ftape driver.

Have you checked /var/log/messages for any fdc/ftape messages?

One final thing, again if you are using an accelerator card, you may
have
to edit the FDC_OPT line to set the correct IRQ, I/O and DMA settings in 
/usr/src/linux/drivers/char/ftape/Makefile

Sorry if I'm rambling, but it's been a long day

George
 
Carter B. Bennett wrote:
> 
> Yes George I have, and when I do a "lsmod ftape" It showes me ftape.
> Isn't telling me support is there?
> 
> At 11:09 AM 08/17/1999 -0500, you wrote:
> >Carter,
> >
> >Have you tried re-building your kernel with ftape support turned on?
> >You can find this option under "character devices" (at least under RH4.2
> >you can)
> >
> >George
> >
> >Carter B. Bennett wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi All,
> >> I have a Iomega Easy 800 floppy tape drive installed on my computer. I have
> >> in Red Hat 5.1 and 5.2 been able to use the:
> >>
> >> mt -f /dev/ftape rewind
> >>
> >> But now in RH 6.0 the message:
> >>
> >> /dev/ftape: No Such Device
> >>
> >> is returned. I have also tried "nftape" with the same results.
> >> I am doing this as "root" user. Also nftape yealds the same results.
> >>
> >> In the /dev dir nftape & ftape are links to nrft0 & rft0:
> >>
> >> ftape - > rft0
> >> nftape - > nrft0
> >>
> >> both ftape & nftape have permissions of : lrwxrwxrwx
> >> both rft0 & nrft0 have permissions of : crw_rw____
> >>
> >> Am I doing something wrong or is something broken?