# mt -f /dev/st0 retension /dev/st0: No medium found OK, so we know the drive works becaues it can see that it doesn't have a tape. This also means that I will have to drive the whole 2.5 miles up to school and shove in a tape. Thanks to all who have helped. Caleb Newville - MPS WebCrew http://www.mustang.k12.ok.us ----------8<---------- Since no one else has chimed in yet. I will give it a shot. I have not had to manaully do anything with my tape drive in a while other than change tapes. I use amanda to back up 4 machines on my network to a DLT drive. I would first check to see if the drive can be talked to. A quick simple test, I would do is use mt to see if it can talk to the drive. The drive should be /dev/st0 or /dev/nst0 (no rewind) viewing /var/log/messages or dmesg should indicate it was found. Create a symlink to it from /dev/TAPE (this should be the default for most programs that are tape aware including mt IIRC. Might be there already. If not: ln -s /dev/st0 /dev/TAPE try: mt retension This shoud take the tape all the way to the end and back. Not a bad idea for new tapes anyway. If that worked,(drive kicked of an ran for a while) then send a short file to the device, or tar a directory or two and send it there. The thing that I had the most trouble with as I first started dinking with tapes is treating the device as the filename. Once I got that down I had few problems. try something like : (its been a while but should be close) cd /tmp tar -cv ./* >/dev/TAPE I suspect that tar -cvf /dev/TAPE ./* would work as well This creates a tarfile with the contents of /tmp and all subdirectories and sends it to the tape. to check it you can mkdir /tmp/tapetest cd /tmp/tapetest tar -xv * < /dev/TAPE Should create a tmp directory tree under the tapetest dir. you can also simply cat a file to the device cat myfile >/dev/TAPE cat /dev/TAPE < myfile.too There are lots of sites with better information. search on backup tape of something similar in google HTH Bret ----------8<---------- I like this pair of commands: tar -cvf /dev/TAPE ~/* tar -df /dev/TAPE ~/* or tar -cvf /dev/TAPE ~/* tar -tf /dev/TAPE The first pair archive you home directory, and then does a compair between the tape and the disk. If you get no output, everything matches. The second pair again archives your home directory, but instead of doing a compare, it just lists the file names in the archive. Or you can run the first line, and then the second lines from both... Mikkel _______________________________________________ Redhat-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
