From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.78 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.7-10 i686) Description of problem: I have an Onstream ide tape drive which worked fine under RH 7.1 with the RH kernels and also with standard Linux kernels 2.4.8, 2.4.9 and 2.4.10. After an upgrade to RH kernel 2.4.9-7 it stops working. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 2.4.9-7 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Upgrade to 2.4.9-7 kernel 2.modprobe ide-tape 3.Try any tape access command. e.g.: mt -f /dev/ht0 status Actual Results: The command returns no such device. lsmod shows the ide-tape module loaded but this error appears in /var/log/messages: modprobe: Can't locate module char-major-97 and appears to be related. Expected Results: The mt command should execute: reporting the drive status or rewinding the tape or whatever. Additional info: This tape drive worked fine with a standard linux 2.4.9 kernel previously under RH 7.1 which indicates the failure is due to RH's kernel modifications and not a flaw in the 2.4.9 kernel itself. It works fine with kernel 2.4.7-10 shipped with RH 7.2.
Requestor, please do the following. Sorry for the fuzzy instructions... Find what "hard disk" would correspond to the tape if it was on the same "address", and identify its directory in /proc/ide/ide?/hd? Suppose, that it is /proc/ide/ide0/hdb. Do this: "grep debug_level /proc/ide/ide0/hdb", it should find something if this is a tape, nothing for hard disks. Then, do: # echo debug_level:6 > /proc/ide/ide0/hdb/settings # mt -f /dev/ht0 status <error messages> # echo debug_level:0 > /proc/ide/ide0/hdb/settings # dmesg > /tmp/dmesg.out In the end, attach the resulting dmesg.out to the bug. Please, do not drop dmesg contents into the comments box.
I didn't get a chance to try your suggestion before today since I needed the tape drive for backups. This morning I upgraded to kernel 2.4.9-13 amd the problem has disappeared. BTW the message: `modprobe: Can't locate module char-major-97' seems to be unrelated to this problem. It appears to be connected with ide-scsi (I've got a CD burner in the same box).