UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I'm trying to mount tape drive so I can tar from a cd.
this is what i type: mount /dev/rsd2940.4 /mnt
this is what i get: mount /dev/rsd2940.4 on /mnt : Block device required
I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. It's my understanding that rsd2940.4 is the block device. An interesting thing I saw is that when I did an ls -lasg in the /dev, that device had an asterisk next to the four that indicates the SCSI id.
I would appreciate any input that someone might have. Thanks

I don't know your os, but in general terms, look at this:

Code:

$ ls -l /dev/dsk/c0t0d0
brw-r-----   1 bin        sys         31 0x000000 Aug 31  2000 /dev/dsk/c0t0d0
$ ls -l /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0
crw-r-----   1 bin        sys        188 0x000000 Oct 28  2004 /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0
$

The lead b is for block device and the leading c is for a character device. A block device connects to a driver that does all i/o via the via buffer cache. It is very rare to have a block tape device, but some versions of HP-UX did. This supported mountable tapes that were used for recovery. These tape had to be specially formatted so they appeared to have a filesystem on them. I would be surpised if your os supports mountable tapes, but it is possible.

It is not clear why you want to mount a tape drive to tar from a cd. I would think you need to use a cd drive to read your cd.