[lug] ftape distress

Harris, James A (Jim) HarriJA at LOUISVILLE.STORTEK.COM
Tue Feb 15 21:31:10 MST 2000


Hi all!

I've decided that I'm officially loosing a battle to my tape drive and
desperately need some help.  The tape drive is a HP Colorado T1000 hooked
directly into my MBs floppy controller.  As far as I can tell, the drive is
functional.  If I put a tape in, it does it's gyrations like it should and
then settles down and acts ready.  Here's what I've tried:

Slackware 4.0, Kernel 2.26 (original for distro)
Abit TX-5 Mobo
ftape 3.04d (distro default)

I've dug through the ftape HowTO and have not been able to figure it out.
The HowTO appears to have been written for 4.0 and I haven't been able to
line up an old version for 3.x yet.  I've tried compiling ftape 4.x, but
haven't had any success.

I load the module like such:  "modprobe ftape.o"
I then try using the command "mt" as such:  "mt status"  (I've also tried
"mt -f /dev/ftape status" and "mt -f /dev/qft0 status")
It tells me that the /dev/tape device does not exist.  (Or with the other
tries, simply that the device doesn't exist)

As far as I can ignorantly tell, the module appears to be loading.  Here's
the snippet from /var/log/messages when I load the module:
Feb 15 20:56:58 mustafa kernel: ftape v3.04d 25/11/97 
Feb 15 20:56:58 mustafa kernel: (c) 1993-1996 Bas Laarhoven (bas at vimec.nl) 
Feb 15 20:56:58 mustafa kernel: (c) 1995-1996 Kai Harrekilde-Petersen
(khp at dolphinics.no) 
Feb 15 20:56:58 mustafa kernel: (c) 1996-1997 Claus-Justus Heine
(claus at momo.math.rwth-aachen.de) 
Feb 15 20:56:58 mustafa kernel: QIC-117 driver for QIC-40/80/3010/3020
floppy tape drives 
Feb 15 20:56:58 mustafa kernel: Compiled for Linux version 2.2.6 
Feb 15 20:56:58 mustafa kernel: [000] ftape-init.c (ftape_init) - installing
QIC-117 floppy tape hardware drive ... . 
Feb 15 20:56:58 mustafa kernel: [001] ftape-init.c (ftape_init) - ftape_init
@ 0xc485504c. 
Feb 15 20:56:58 mustafa kernel: [002]   ftape-buffer.c (add_one_buffer) -
buffer nr #1 @ c2d37140, dma area @ c0ff8000. 
Feb 15 20:56:58 mustafa kernel: [003]   ftape-buffer.c (add_one_buffer) -
buffer nr #2 @ c2d37da0, dma area @ c0ff0000. 
Feb 15 20:56:58 mustafa kernel: [004]   ftape-buffer.c (add_one_buffer) -
buffer nr #3 @ c2d37920, dma area @ c0fe8000. 
Feb 15 20:56:58 mustafa kernel: [005]   ftape-calibr.c (time_inb) - inb()
duration: 710 nsec. 
Feb 15 20:56:58 mustafa kernel: [006]  ftape-calibr.c (ftape_calibrate) - TC
for `ftape_udelay()' = 1097 nsec (at 5119 counts). 
Feb 15 20:56:58 mustafa kernel: [007]  ftape-calibr.c (ftape_calibrate) - TC
for `fdc_wait()' = 2012 nsec (at 2559 counts). 

So, that's what I'm getting.  I'm totally stumped.  Using tape under Linux
is totally new to me and I'm sure it's something really stupid that I'm
doing wrong.  Any advice would be extremely appreciated.

Thanks!!
-Jim




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