I'm trying to install a tape drive on a compaq SCO OS 505. well I have gone through the mkdev tape comands and what have you yet no luck. when I reboot and do a simple tape rewind it gives me an error no such device etc.etc. IS there a diference in the xct0 and rct0 a the default?

help..

Ok,
I Experienced this problems before. You may try with this steps.
If you can tar cvf /dev/rStp0 .(or rStp1 if this was the second drive), but cannot do "tape" commands, then run mkdev tape again and select the default tape drive. Or for a quicker test:

rm /dev/xct0
mknod /dev/xct0 c 46 128 (assuming rStp0)

and then try "tape status" etc.

For tapes, the minor number for ioctl is 128. The ioctl devices are /dev/xct0, /dev/xStp0, etc. If you have created a SCSI tape, but didn't set it as default, then the /dev/xct0 is

crw-r--r-- 1 root sys 10,128 Sep 21 10:35 /dev/xct0

which has the right minor number, but the major (10) is for a cartridge tape, not SCSI.

You could fix this as suggested above, or by editing /etc/default/tape and changing the

device = /dev/xct0
to
device = /dev/xStp0

Give a try first, let me know if this helps.
Works for me.

Well I finally got fed up with it and desided to go back to the frist step. I opend the server and verified all the phisical connections.
I found out that the tape drive was actually connected to the host 0 and bus 1 and the jumper on the tape drive was set to id1.
and I was setting it up at mkdev tape as on host 0 bus 0 id 1.
Well after actually installing it to the propper settings it still didnt work, till I noticed at boot that the server was recognising the tape drive at id 2. That was odd because I verified the jumper and it was on id 1. so to make a long story short I just set the parameter hots 0 moved the cable to bus 0 and set the tape id to 2 and it worked.


Thanks for the advice, I gues I learn more the hard way.