Adding tape drives

Problems with Irwin and QIC-40/80 tape drives

You may encounter the following problems with Irwin and QIC-40/80 tape drives:

Irwin or QIC-40/80 tape drive not recognized at bootup

The system recognizes a Irwin or floppy tape drive if it displays a message similar to one of the following at boot time:

   %ctmini	-		-	-	type=ir
   %ctmini	-		-	-	type=QIC-40
   %ctmini	-		-	-	type=QIC-80

If it cannot find the tape drive, the system displays a message such as:

   ir: ERROR: Tape controller (type=irwin) not found

Verify that the settings you supplied when you installed the drive match the actual jumper settings on the back of the floppy tape drive. Refer to the hardware documentation.

Difficulty backing up Irwin and QIC-40/80 tape drives

For most efficient use, we recommend that you perform tape backups in maintenance mode.

NOTE: When backing up files in maintenance mode, you must explicitly mount non-root filesystems.

If you see a cannot allocate buffer or not enough space error message while using the tape drive, you have run out of memory.
If you are using an Irwin mini-cartridge tape drive, reboot your system into maintenance (single-user) mode, run /etc/mcdaemon, and restart the backup. The Irwin drive requires mcdaemon to be run before the drive may be used.
If you are using a QIC-40 or QIC-80 drive, see the floppytape(HW) manual page for information on ft.alloc.switch, ft.minbufs, and ft.maxbufs. These values give an indication of how to allocate more memory at system initialization time for QIC-40 and QIC-80 tape drivers.

Tape formatting fails

The tape format command is only supported for use with Irwin, QIC-40 and QIC-80 tape drives. You must bulk-erase tapes before using the tape format command to re-format them. This means that if a tape has been format-written previously, you must erase it with a bulk eraser before you can format-write it again. (See tape(C) for more information.) If the tape format command fails, the drive light flashes rapidly. You must reset the drive by removing the tape cartridge. The driver does not detect this condition and no error message is generated. All tape operations fail until the tape is removed and reinserted.

Incorrect device nodes for Wangtek QIC-80 tape drives

mkdev(ADM) incorrectly creates device nodes for Wangtek QIC-80 tape drives with minor numbers 1 and 129. These should be deleted and replaced with minor numbers 5 and 9 respectively using mknod(C).