Topic: "no tape loaded" error

[Jared Hill]

I have a Seagate IDE Travan tape drive that I recently installed.  I configured the server to do the daily tape backups, I inserted an unlocked blank tape, and I get the message that there is "no tape loaded" at the scheduled time.

When the server boots up, it recognizes both the hard drive and the tape drive...is there any configuration that I need to do?  I'm fairly new with the software and servers in general, so any basic help would be great.  Thanks!

Jared

[Kelvin]

Jared,

Can you test this :-

Boot the server with no tape loaded and try a backup. Do you get a "no tape loaded" error.

Insert a tape, then reboot the server with a tape loaded. Now try the backup command again. This time, do you find the same error appearing ?

Kelvin

[Jared Hill]

I've tried both booting with a tape in, and without...no luck.Kelvin wrote:

[Kelvin]

Jared,

Do you know if your tape drive requires the use of the ide-scsi module ? With other IDE tape drives I have used, ide-scsi is a must and without it, the drives won't work.

I have come across issues with SME 5.6 and a Sony IDE AIT-1 drive before. Due to what I think is a timing issue, the AIT-1 will not initialise correctly at boot time if there is no tape in the drive (but works fine if there is one). The trick then is to force SME to reload the ide-scsi module and the st module to correctly recognise the drive.

Obviously, I'm assuming you have verified that the drive is configured correctly, hardware wise, ie. cabling and jumpers, etc.

Kelvin

[Jared Hill]

I'm 100% new to this whole process...how do I set up the ide-scsi module?

[Marco]

Do you have /dev/tape symlinked to the device the Seagate IDE Travan tape is on?

In my case: Onstream DI30:

[root@e-smith /root]# ls -la /dev/tape
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           10 Oct 15 18:36 /dev/tape -> /dev/osst0

[Danny Wong]

How can you determin which device your tape drive is on?

[Marco]

[root@e-smith /root]# dmesg | grep TAPE
hdc: OnStream DI-30, ATAPI TAPE drive

YMMV.

[jeff@jeffandsteph.com]

I had difficulties getting the Seagate 40/20 gig tape to work correctly with flexbackup. (the default program used by SME 5.1.2 -> the version my production server is running. There were two things I needed to change to get the drive working 100% of the time.

1) Use the IDE-SCSI emulation layer as detailed in the following tech document:
http://www.linuxtapecert.org/ATAPI.html   (yes... this is what the previous posting was suggesting.)

2) If you are using SME 5.1.2, there is a bug in the template, and you must download and install the: flexbackup-0.9.8-07es.noarch.rpm file which is part of the SME 5.6 iso.


Don't forget to configure the tape backup using the SME Server Manager control panel so that your changes are written to the proper script.