ide tape drive issues

[Daniel Watrous]

Hello all,

I have a dell poweredge 600SC that was originally installed with Redhat 8.  I downloaded fedora core 2 and performed an upgrade to this system.  Before the upgrade the IDE tape drive worked fine with a SCSI emulator which comes compiled into the linux kernel by default.  After the upgrade I began to see the following error:
root$ mt -f /dev/nst0 status
/dev/nst0: No such device or address

I ran the diagnostics and found that the tape drive is functioning properly.  At length I looked at the grub.conf file and found the following line:
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.5-1.358 ro root=LABEL=/ /dev/ht0=ide-scsi
and so I tried to access ht0.  This worked, but a little different than before.  Commands like status no longer give the same type of output, for example:

Originally status would produce something like this:
 SCSI 2 tape drive:
 File number=-1, block number=-1, partition=0.
 Tape block size 0 bytes. Density code 0x0 (default).
 Soft error count since last status=0
 General status bits on (10000):
  IM_REP_EN


Now status shows:
 SCSI 2 tape drive:
 File number=0, block number=0, partition=0.
 Tape block size 512 bytes. Density code 0x0 (default).
 Soft error count since last status=0
 General status bits on (0):

I'm not familiar with the details of this output and notwithstanding my efforts on google I can't find a good explanation.  The tar command no longer functions correctly.  Specifically I have a script that issues "tar Pcf /dev/nst0 /first/dir" followed by "tar Prf /dev/nst0 /second/dir".  After linking nst0 to nht0 (ln ./nht0 /dev/nst0), this script runs without error, but only the "/second/dir" is stored on the tape.

Is there some way to reinstall the tape?  Is this SCSI-IDE related?  Any ideas or good reference material?  Thanks in advance!

Daniel
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