Thanks tradewind, but I am positive the tape drive is IDE. I will look into your commands when I get back to the office.

I'm almost certain the tape drive is being recognized as HDD. Does this mean I need an emulator?

Have you tried
?

Try using the mt command to 'talk' to the tape drive. For example:
mt -f /dev/tape rewind
mt -f /dev/tape fsf 1

If /dev/hdd is really your tape drive you should see some tape movement. Did you look in the output of dmesg for your Travan tape?

If I replace "tape" with "hdd", it gives me the following message:

mt: /dev/hdd is not a character special file

Is there a problem with it being an IDE drive rather than SCSI?

Try the following:
ls -ld /dev/hdd*

Then try those...

I punched that in and it listed all the devices starting with "hdd". Was I supposed to get something from that?

I was suggesting that you try those (ie /dev/hdd1) for your tape device if you suspect that it's showing up as hdd. Do you see anything about your Travan in the dmesg output?

Hi,

After reading all these posts now I am sure you have a good understanding of tar. In order to check if your tape drive is working or not you can use the "mt status" command. If your tape is installed properly it gives you the status of your tape, but if it gave you this error "/dev/tape: No such file or directory" it means you have not installed your tape drive properly. Check to see what this link is pointing to "ls -l /dev/tape" then you can come to know what is your tape drive device file.

For backing up also you might want to consider the star command which is very usefull.

Good luck

For the first question, write a script with a Synchronizer and then have cron run it. You can make the script mount or do anything else you need it to do, And cron will run it with out a user even loged in.

Thanks for all the help guys, and I am terribly sorry for not getting back in here sooner. We have decided to purchase all new IBM equipment, already installed and ready to go live too. The old equipment is no longer needed at this moment and I have been pulled off of it. However, I am still going to figure out this deal for future reference. I email Suse directly and they said I need to use the IDE-SCSI emulator.

Again I greatly appreciate all your efforts and I am going to bookmark this thread, heh.