write a tar-archive to a ide tapedrive

[Daniel Johansson]

Hi, I've got a IDE-tapedrive and it is recognised by FreeBSD 4.8. I
haven't tried to use it before but I started to play with it today, but
it doesn't work very well, I think. I have read the handbook but I can't
say that it helped me very much.

Some info about the box and tapedriver:
FreeBSD donnex.net 4.8-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE #2: Fri Apr 18 13:12:41 CEST 2003 root at donnex.net:/usr/src/sys/compile/donnex i386
ast0: TAPE <HP COLORADO 8GB> at ata1-master PIO4

When I insert a tape it starts to rewind the tape, I think, atleast I
get a lot of noice from the tapedriver. When I try to run mt rewind I
don't get any output and I can't hear that the tape gets rewinded. Is
this normal or bad?

[root at donnex.net: /dev] mt -f /dev/ast0 rewind
[root at donnex.net: /dev] 

I can get some info about the tapedriver so I think it works:
[root at donnex.net: /dev] mt -f /dev/ast0 status
Mode      Density              Blocksize      bpi      Compression
Current:  0x01:X3.22-1983      512 bytes      800      none
---------available modes---------
0:        default              variable       0        none
1:        default              variable       0        none
2:        default              variable       0        none
3:        default              variable       0        none
---------------------------------
File Number: 0  Record Number: 0        Residual Count 0
[root at donnex.net: /dev] 

Anyway when I try to write a tar archive to the tapedrive I get erros.
Does anyone know why or how I can fix it?


[root at donnex.net: /dev] tar cf /dev/ast0 /home/
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
tar: /dev/ast0: Wrote only 0 of 10240 bytes
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
[root at donnex.net: /dev] 

-- 
Daniel Johansson - <donnex at donnex.net>