I have a dlt tape drive on a AIX 5.1 machine, I have no idea how to backup to this thing, would I just mount it can copy over to it, not sure the commands or where to begin? Can anyone help, or point me to documentation....

actuall this is how prtconf lists it


+ rmt0 40-60-00-0,0 SCSI 8mm Tape Drive (20000 MB)

ok, after some research i got this far


I have come to a wall.
Im trying to copy files to a 8mm tape drive on hostname, using the cpio command. Something like this

ls_*.c_|_cpio_-ov_>/dev/rmt0

I keep getting this

Cannot write to disk

Can anyone help?

Does /dev/rmt0 exist? I don't know AIX, but it may be /dev/rmt/0. The file must exist and be a special file that points to the tape drive.

First - let me mention I don't have an AIX system to test with

But, you should be able to use the following commands to see if the system can use the tape drive. Check your documentation (man pages) for proper use of commands given.

List tape drives:
$ ls -l /dev/rmt

Get status of tape drive (put a tape in the tape drive)

$ mt -f /dev/rmt/0 status

To see if you can backup files to it - cvf means create, verbose, file to backup to (normally not needed when using /dev/rmt/0 but I usually put it in anyway)
$ cd /var/adm
$ tar cvf /dev/rmt/0 .

yes, /dev/rmt0 is there, and if i run

# lsdev -Cc tape
rmt0 Available 40-60-00-0,0 SCSI 8mm Tape Drive


this leads me to believe it is available

what command is this?

mt -f /dev/rmt/0 status

specifically the mt command?

ignore the part about mt in my previous post, i got this

# mt -f /dev/rmt0 status
rmt0 Available 40-60-00-0,0 SCSI 8mm Tape Drive
attribute value description user_settable

mode yes Use DEVICE BUFFERS during writes True
block_size 1024 BLOCK size (0=variable length) True
extfm no Use EXTENDED file marks True
ret no RETENSION on tape change or reset True
density_set_1 39 DENSITY setting #1 True
density_set_2 39 DENSITY setting #2 True
compress yes Use data COMPRESSION True
size_in_mb 20000 Size in Megabytes False
ret_error no RETURN error on tape change or reset True