recently, i was forced to reinstall a fc1 distro and was able to get it up and working.

i know that this is antiquated info but the problems i had may be of some help to someone else with similar problems.

the original problems was an input output error using a ATAPI tape drive. after a lot of work and research i found the solutions.

i looked in / var/ log and reviewd dmesg and messages. i checked the hardware browser and found the tape drive as /dev/hdd.

using
# lsmod|more
i found ide-tape, ide-cdrom, scsi-mod, sg, installed in the modules and found that the drive was usually assigned as ht0 by the system, from the internet. good so far.

i used the
# mt -f /dev/ht0 status

to determine that it found it but when i tried to read a tape i got the input out error from tar. not so good.

more research on the internet and i found that i probably needed the ide-scsi module installed. after a lot of testing and mistakes i found that the
# modprobe ide-scsi

installed the st module and the
#mt -f /dev/st0 status
command found the tape drive and i knew i was on the right track

now the lsmod found

#lsmode|more

found the ide-cdrom , st , sg , scsi-mod modules

i tested w/ tar

#tar tvf /dev/st0
on a tape and it wouldn't read it. again more research and thought that it might be a zip compressed and found the command

#tar tzf /dev/st0

and it coughed up the whole tape list. hooray!!

i used a blank tape and made a test tape

#tar cvf /dev/st0 /boot

it worked. it was not compressed but it made the backup

then the problem was to get it to load the st module on boot---real problem. no help anywherer!!
more testing but only the manual loading of the module worked.

#modprobe ide-scsi

was a good command but no load at boot up. searched all the /etc/rc.d files but nothing worked.

i know the solution was easy when i found it!!

add it to the grub boot file. first i tested it on reboot and added it to the boot up linux screen by editing the boot up script. i just added it to the end of the line "ide-scsi" and it worked.

then i added it to the /boot/grub/grub.conf file and it was permanent.

hope this helps someone down the road. this process took me several nights to figure it all out. i guess i am not such a great wizard of linux yet.

good luck