[TriLUG] IDE tape problems with RH 8.0

[Mike Norwood]

Hello,

I loaded RH 8 and tried to move over some data with tar using an IDE tape 
drive.  The system locked up, tried again, it locked up again. I then 
loaded Mandrake 9.0 and could use tape fine.  I reloaded Redhat again to 
see if it was just a fluke, but again the system locks up when I try to 
access the tape drive.  I looked in /var/log/messages and it shows much 
information dumped from the tape drive, all sorts of things about the type 
of tape drive and its capacity, then it reaches a line idetape_chrdev_open 
and the next entries are from the system rebooting after I had to turn the 
power off and back on.  I realize most people are probably using SCSI 
tapes, but this still seems like a pretty big flaw.  If anyone else has an 
ide tape drive working correctly with Redhat 8.0, or has any suggestions 
they would be much appreciated.

I do find I can get the drive to work by inserting ide-scsi module and 
using /dev/st0 but this gives a "sense key illegal request" message after every 
tape command, even though file does appear to restore correctly.  If 
someone has a way to prevent this from happening that would help as well.

Thanks again, Mike Norwood