FC2 and tape drives.

[Juan Pablo Claude]

Kevin:

	Thank you for your quick reply. Yes, I have been to the how-To web 
site, and I agree that the Iomega drive should be supported. The trick 
is that both drives use different interfaces. The T3000 is FDC, whereas 
the Iomega has its accelerator card. So, I have to compile the ftape 
module for one or the other.

	However, this web site: http://www.linuxtapecert.org/index.html, 
indicates that the ftape module supports four devices, and they mix an 
internal drive and a parallel port Ditto drive, as:

insmod ./ftape.o ft_fdc_driver=ftape-internal,bpck-fdc,none,none 
ft_tracings=3,3,0,0,3

	The problem is that that is as far as the information goes. Perhaps, 
what I could do is connect the T3000 FDC drive to the Iomega 
accelerator card too, as it is supposed to support a floppy drive too. 
Thanks again.

Juan-Pablo





On Nov 5, 2004, at 4:08 PM, Kevin J. Cummings wrote:

> Juan Pablo Claude wrote:
>> Greetings out there:
>>     I have revived an old PC (Pentium II 350 MHz) to use as a home 
>> server and I installed FC2 on it. I have also installed a couple of 
>> tape drives to use for backup. One is an HP Colorado T3000, attached 
>> as a sole device to the on-board floppy disk controller. This drive 
>> works fine after I recompiled the kernel to include the ftape and 
>> zftape modules, and can be accessed as /dev/qft0 as expected. The 
>> issue is with the other drive, a Tecmar/Iomega Ditto Max 
>> Professional. This drive has an ISA plug-and-play accelerator board 
>> (Ditto Dash MX). Right now, the drive is not accessible, as I did not 
>> compile the ftape module to access the accelerator board (I had 
>> trouble doing that previously). However, I understand that ftape can 
>> support up to four  devices. Does anyone know of a way to activate 
>> both drives? I would really like to use the Tecmar drive as it is 
>> faster and has a higher capacity. Ultimately, the best scenario would 
>> be to be able to use both.
>>     The ftape documentation is outdated and somewhat intractable. I 
>> would appreciate any help you could give me. Thanks.
>
> The ftape documentation, while old, should still contain correct data 
> on the tape drives it supports.  It was written to provide support for 
> the old Colorado 40MB and then 80MB taoe devices, which support the 
> QIC-113 so called "floppy tape" standard.  This includes the QIC-40 
> and QIC-80 formats that Colorado used.  It was extended to try and 
> support every tape drive out there, but some manufacturers (like 
> IOmega) thought they could grab market share by using proprietary tape 
> formats and protocols that gave them a slight capacity edge (including 
> using patented technologies).  Then as tape drive capacity increased, 
> it becam unfeasable to continue to use the Floppy drive interface (it 
> was just plain too slow, even with the accelerator cards), so the 
> Travan compatible drives (at least the later ones) started to migrate 
> to the IDE controller and FTape was no longer needed.
>
> The old FTape home page still exists (I was just there) at:
>
> http://www.instmath.rwth-aachen.de/~heine/ftape/
>
> It has a last modified date of July 20, 2000, which means no work has 
> been done on that WWW site since then.  I found some of the links on 
> this page were broken, but I did find the following in a 1997 version 
> of the FTAPE-HOWTO:
>
>> 4.4 Is the Iomega Ditto Max drive supported?
>> Yes, if you are using version ftape-4.02 or later of the Ftape 
>> drivers from the Ftape Home Page or from 
>> ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/kernel/tapes.
>> <answer from Claus Heine>
>> 4.5 Is the Iomega Ditto Max Pro drive supported?
>> Yes. But if you want to use the 5GB (10GB with compression) 
>> cartridges you don't need it. With ftape there doesn't seem to be any 
>> difference between the Ditto Max and the Ditto Max Pro.
>> <answer from Claus Heine>
>
> I haven't used FTape in years (at least 5 of them!).  Not since my 
> Exabyte Eagle tape drive overheated and died....
>
> If you are going to access more than 1 tape drive on the same cable, 
> you may need to set a device select jumper on one or more of the 
> drives. This, of course, is a drive dependant thing.  If you do it 
> right, you should be able to use /dev/ft0 & /dev/ft1 (or /dev/qft0 & 
> /dev/qft1).  YMMV.
>
> -- 
> Kevin J. Cummings
> kjchome at rcn.com
> cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
> cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
>
> -- 
> fedora-list mailing list
> fedora-list at redhat.com
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