mounting DAT drive

[C. Linus Hicks]

On Wed, 2004-08-25 at 21:30, Toto Gamez wrote:
> hi
> I have a compaq proliant 1600 with scsi internal 4/8 gb dat drive, how do I mount it or what dev do I have to mount for me to do backup or browse the content of dat tape. when I installed RHFC2 the dev where /dev/ida/c0d0p1 to p7.
>  

Tape drives generally show up as sequential-access devices and are
character devices, so they are not mountable. Under Linux they will show
up as /dev/st0 with the digit incrementing for each physical drive. You
can apply various modifiers to the device name that change the behavior
of the drive.

The difference between /dev/st0 and /dev/nst0 is that the first will
automatically rewind the tape when it is closed, the second does not.

There are also /dev/st0l, /dev/st0m, and /dev/st0a which are mode2,
mode3, and mode4 respectively. Plain old /dev/st0 is mode1. There are
also /dev/nst0l, etc. The value of the different modes is explained in
the stinit(8) man page.

You can use the mt command to manipulate the tape drive, but you really
need to know what is on the tape in order for it to be useful. The tar
command can be used to directly read or write tar files to tape. There
are many other programs that can also be used.
-- 
C. Linus Hicks <lhicks at nc.rr.com>