Installation

I installed my SCSI PCI card and SCSI Seagate DDS2 DAT drive, then attempted to have Harddrake detect and install the necessary drivers, however only the scsi pci card was recognized.

I then rebooted with the DAT drive on and proceeded to boot from the Mandrake installation cdrom and chose:

"Expert" and "Update".
 

The Good:

When I logged back into KDE, both the scsi pci card and the tape drive were detected and installed.

The Bad:

I found that my cdrw programs (Kreatecd and Koncd) no longer recognized my CDRW. I fixed this by going into /etc/modules.conf and changed the following lines from:

alias scsi_hostadapter aic7xxx
alias scsi_hostadapter1 ide-scsi

to:

alias scsi_hostadapter ide-scsi
alias scsi_hostadapter1 aic7xxx

Now both the scsi card and cdrw scsi emulation work.

SCSI Drives In Linux

SCSI tape drives are normally mounted and addressed by the raw device name. The first tape drive (lowest number) on the chain is /dev/st0, the second /dev/st1.

Install ftape or mt-st Packages

You'll need to have either the mt-st (magnetic tape control) or ftape packages installed, you will not be able to perform backups to your tape drive without one of these.

I use the BRU backup-restore utility, it's has a graphical mode that's very easy to use (xbru) and there's a 30 day demo available from: http://www.estinc.com

Before installing BRU you will need to install the Mandrake "tck" and, as mentioned above the "mt-st" package.

Mt Commands And Crash Recovery
 

The "man mt" command will give you the mt syntax, for positioning, erasing and rewinding tapes.

The following command checks your DAT drive:

mt -f /dev/nst0 status