Linux and Colorado IDE internal

[M Phillips]

I have a Redhat 6.2 system, and would like to use an HP Colorado 8Gb Internal Drive to back it up. The system detects the drive ok when it boots - but I can't mount it because it doesn't seem to recognise any Linux standard format on the tape.
Has anyone managed to get this combination of hardware and software to work successfully?
The Colorado drive seems to have a product reference C4387B.

[Dave Kelly_1]

You can't mount a tape drive from what I remember.

You can reference it through the device name (/dev/tape or /dev/ft0 ?) when using tar etc.

You need to select the FTAPE options when compiling the kernel.

[M Phillips]

Perhaps I am using the wrong terminology. The Red Hat Linux Manual (Que Books - Duane Hellums)suggests "you must mount the device somewhere on your system". However, if I can reference rather than mount it, how do I then go about copying files onto it? Certainly Red Hat 6.0 is said to support IDE tape drives with the standard kernel configuration. I am obviously missing something somewhere along the line.

[Dave Kelly_1]

I did some more checking on some Linux pages and found

http://lhd.datapower.com/db/dispproduct.php3?DISP?1164

The device name should be /dev/ht0.
Provided that your kernel has the IDE tape options compiled in, you should be ok.

As an example for use, you could use the command:

tar -cvf /dev/ht0 /tmp

To tar the files in the /tmp directory to your tape drive.