[KLUG Members] Tape Drive Setting up

[Adam Williams]

>I never actually set up a tape drive in linux before, so I'm hoping 
>someone could give me some instruction.  I have an old colorado jumbo
>120mb floppy tape drive.   The data cable is connected to the tape
>drive, and the other end is connected to motherboard's floppy
>interface.  The floppy drive data cable is connected to the data cable
>leading to tape drive.  Tested floppy drive to see it still works...it
>does. Everything all good so far?  I am running redhat 7.2, kernal
>version 2.4.7-10.  I simply did a full installation of redhat.

I don't believe that FDC drives are supported in recent kernels.  I had
a 250Mb and support seemed to fade out in the late 2.2.x kernels.   They
weren't very reliable (or fast) anyway, under any OS.

A 2Gb 4mm DAT drive can be found at the local sales and e-bay for ~$20
(or less).  I'd really recommend just picking up one of those.

FDC devices are sensitive to speed.  There was some comments
back-in-the-day that supporting an FDC drive on a 800MHz machine just
wasn't practicle.  Hence the migration IDE tape drives in the consumer
market.