[lug] tape drive and tar questions

[Scott T. Kelley]

I have a couple of questions about tape drives, and if anyone can help I be
very appreciative.

(1) My first question concerns a new tape drive I had put in a Dell
Precision 420 workstation running Red Hat 7.0: The tape drive is supposedly
connected correctly and working (the local Dell service guy put it in after
Dell sent me the wrong drive) but I tried running the KDAT program under KDE
and the drive is not detected. Is there some diagnostics I can run to detect
the drive? I forget what device file it is supposed to be (/dev/rmt/0 ??)

I just want to detect the drive and see if it is working. Of course, I also
want to be able to write to it and read from it! ;-)

(2) On another machine I am having trouble reading a tape that should have
data on it. I run:
>tar -tvf /dev/rmt/0  or tar -tvf /dev/rmt/0 /
to check the tape and I get:
tar: Read error on /dev/rmt/0: Not enough space
tar: At beginning of tape, quitting now
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

Am I at the wrong point of the tape and how do I get to the right part if
so? Should I try another command? I find the whole tape drive thing very
confusing to be honest. Maybe there is a comprehensive primer out there for
novices like me?

Thanks for any help you can send my way. -Scott

-------------------
Scott T. Kelley, Ph.D.
Campus Box 347
MCD Biology
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0347
Phone: (303) 735-1808
Fax: (303) 492-7744
E-mail: Scott.Kelley at Colorado.edu