PDA

View Full Version : [ubuntu] Tape drive works with tar but is invisible in nautilus



Jan Sloep
December 30th, 2008, 04:25 PM
Hi all,

I have Ubuntu 8.10 (64 bit) and a (scsi) ADR50 Onstream tape drive. The system recognizes the tape drive and I can use the "mt" and "tar" commands on it. This works all fine.

Now I want to use the drive with "grsync" but I can not connect to the tape drive as it is not visible, also not in Nautilus.
If I try to mount /dev/st0 it says that dev/st0 can't be found in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab.

Can somebody tell me how I can connect to the tape drive from grsync and nautilus or what I am doing wrong

P.S. I am new in Linux.

lemming465
January 2nd, 2009, 01:54 AM
I don't think you are going to be able to use tools other than "tar", "star", "dd" or specially written backup programs with a tape drive. Tapes drives are character mode devices, not block mode like disks, and stuff like nautilus and rsync or grsync just won't understand them. You can't just open them and seek around; at a low level it's all wacky ioctl's specific to the tape drive and controller.