Help with tape drive?

[da4055]

Hi,

I am troubleshooting CentOS 4.4 running on a Dell Poweredge 1600SC server system. There is both a SCSI and IDE controller in it. On the IDE is a CDROM as primary master and an Exabyte VXA-2 tape drive as primary slave.

The entire server works perfectly except the tape drive is giving really weird errors like "cdb illegal command" and so on. Thus preventing the "Amanda" backup software from functioning properly. Even running the MT command produces the same illegal instructions and cdb invalid data.

Here is what I've done so far and please keep in mind I'm between newbie and intermediate skill (played around with FreeBSD in the past)

I have tried all hardware-related settings I could think of such as changing the 80-conductor IDE cable with a new one and changing UDMA settings in the BIOS.

I have edited the "grub" bootloader configuration and added the line "ide-scsi" as further research indicated that the "ide-tape" driver was phased out. I also added a /sbin/modprobe ide-scsi and that has made the dev/st0 and dev/nst0 available, for use with the MT command.

Now I should note that the drive itself is working fine as I did a very long "self test" and from what I can tell thats all good. There is a Linux tool for that drive called vxatool. I run that with the -S parameter to show all VXA drives. Theres only one and I thought it would show as /dev/st0 or /dev/nst0. It doesnt. It shows up as /dev/sg0 which apparently is a device related to the SCSI backplane in that server.

I don't know how to capture boot-time screen shots but I did bring up /proc/ide/hdb/status and it shows UDMA enabled as I understand these drives cannot use PIO mode. When CentOS boots up it does detect the drive as an "ATAPI tape device". So... I'm guessing thats good.

So... I'm sure its something real simple that I'm missing here in the grand scheme of things like some sort of hardware or resource conflict. I have no idea where to go from here to troubleshoot this in Linux other than asking you guys!

Thanks for any help.

DJ

[Rubberman]

Have you checked the jumpers to be sure it isn't configured as the IDE master device? If it isn't, have you tried to swap it and the CD-ROM as master/slave (or just unplug the CD-ROM, switch the cable to the tape drive, and set the tape drive jumper to master)?