Mounting HP StorageWorks RDX Tape Drive?

SUSE Linux Enterprise Extensions SLES Hardware
1

I have an old Proliant ML350 G5 with a HP StorageWorks RDX tape drive and several RDX320 tapes that I want to recycle as a spare NFS/tape backup box. I have SLES 11 SP2 installed on the system. I’ve ran a dmesg and found out that my drive is showing up as /dev/sda but I can’t get the drive to show up on the system. I put in a tape an dtried formatting it with mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda but it says device size reported to be zero and doesn’t do anything. If I try mount /dev/sda /mnt/tape, it says /dev/sda is write-protected, mounting read only and can’t read superblock.

When I run the lsscsi command, it spits out:

[3:0:0:0] disk HP RDX 3040 /dev/sda

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Hi spashia,

[QUOTE=spashia;15459]I have an old Proliant ML350 G5 with a HP StorageWorks RDX tape drive and several RDX320 tapes that I want to recycle as a spare NFS/tape backup box. I have SLES 11 SP2 installed on the system. I’ve ran a dmesg and found out that my drive is showing up as /dev/sda but I can’t get the drive to show up on the system. I put in a tape an dtried formatting it with mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda but it says device size reported to be zero and doesn’t do anything. If I try mount /dev/sda /mnt/tape, it says /dev/sda is write-protected, mounting read only and can’t read superblock.

When I run the lsscsi command, it spits out:

[3:0:0:0] disk HP RDX 3040 /dev/sda[/QUOTE]

it seems pretty strange that a tape drive is detected as a disk drive, but on the other hand HP describes your unit as “removable disk backup system”, so it’s probably just the thread title that is misleading :wink:

Have you installed the Proliant Support pack, and does your drive feature the firmware offered by HP for RDX (http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareIndex.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodNameId=3741007&prodTypeId=12169&prodSeriesId=3741006&swLang=8&taskId=135&swEnvOID=4048)? They specifically advertise the firmware as Unix-specific, but I cannot see if it’s just the packaging of if that firmware enables Unix-specific features in the drive.

Regards,
Jens