Believe it or not, we have been struggling for almost four years to get our tape drive to work. We originally had an FC-20 with a 768 meg native 3020 Colorado tape drive. By the time the kernel and ftape had caught up to our model, we had replaced it with an Iomega Ditto Max 3.5 gig native tape drive. Well, the latest version of Ftape, ftape-4.x-1999_04_25, works just swimmingly.

We have a proprietary ISA controller for our Ditto Max. There is a whole separate nightmare getting isapnp to work that we aren’t going to get into here. Here is a copy of our isapnp.conf file, located in /etc. The card we have is io360, irq9, dma3. We compiled the kernel without ftape support and compiled ftape from the latest development release, since there has been quite a bit of improvement lately for our tape drive. Here is our procedure to get ftape running:

Get the latest source distribution from the ftape homepage: http://ftape.dot-heine.de/

Make a directory to extract the sources in, move the distribution to it, and type:
tar -xzf ftape-4.x-1999_04_25.tar.gz (substitute your file, of course).

Edit the MCONFIG file. This is very important. Set your IRQ, etc. Here is a copy of our MCONFIG file.

Then:

make
make install
modprobe ftape
modprobe zftape
dmesg

Make compiles the ftape modules. Make install installs the modules in the correct location. Modprobe loads the ftape and zftape modules, and dmesg will spit out the result of your endeavors from the logs. Make sure that dmesg shows ftape and zftape loaded without errors.

Test your configuration further by performing a retension:
mt -f /dev/ftape reten
dmesg

Some other commands:

Read files on tape
tar tvf /dev/ftape

Backup all files in current directory and subdirectories to tape
tar clvf /dev/ftape *

Verify all files in current directory and subdirectories with tape
tar dvf /dev/ftape
You might consider tacking on > verify.txt so you can capture the results of the verify.

Erase Tape
mt -f /dev/ftape erase

Retension
mt -f /dev/ftape reten