Re: GLUG: HP Colorado 5GB

["Scythe`" <scythe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I have an HP Colorado 5Gb and need to backup either a Mandrake or RedHat
> system. Mandrake 7.1 picks up the drive, but when I try mount the drive
with
> /dev/hdb, no matter what I use for the type, it gives me an incorrect
type.
> Where to from here.


>From personal experience I can say that you can not actually "mount" a tape
device and access it like you would a drive or a partition, the problem
being that is isn't actually that kind of device (or so I am told)

Like Willem said ... use tar, dump, cpio, restore and mt ... mt  is very
nice to interface with the tape drive such as rewind, fsf (forward single
filespace), retension and erase.

One thing I also know ... is that mt uses the /usr/include/sys/mtio.h file
for it's configuration params and the default tape value specified in there
is rarely ever right ... so if you don't want to continually go mt -f
/dev/nht0 rewind the whole time ... do the following.

[maint@Phoenix maint]$ export TAPE=/dev/nht0

Or go edit /etc/profile and manually insert the TAPE variable ... just look
at how the other entries in that file is used and you should be able to just
copy and modify it.

Cool

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