ftape and floppiesSupported tape drivesAll drives that are both QIC-117 compatible and either QIC-40 or
QIC-80 compatible should work. There are also experimental support of QIC-3010
and QIC-3020 drives (QIC-3010/302 can use 8mm tapes. This is sometimes refered
to as `QIC-WIDE'). Currently, the list of drives that are known to work with
ftape is:
You can always check out the newest list of drives that are recognised by
ftape, by looking in the file vendors.h in the
ftape distribution.
(*): The Iomega Ditto 3200 drive comes with a dedicated 2Mbps controller
(called the `Ditto Dash'), which is unsupported. However, you can still use
the Ditto 3200 drive with ftape, if you put the drive on a standard
1Mbps floppy controller.
Although I do not want to endorse one drive type over another, I want to mention that the Colorado DJ-20 drive is rather noisy, when compared to, say, a Conner C250MQ drive ('tis said that the Colorado is 5-10 times as noisy as the Conner drive. I can't tell for sure, but I have a Colorado, and it is quite noisy).
If you have a Tallgrass FS300 and an AHA1542B, you need to increase the bus-on
/ bus-off time of the 1542B. Antti Virjo (<klanvi@uta.fi>),
says that changing CMD_BUSON_TIME to 4 and CMD_BUSOFF_CMD to
12 in linux/drivers/scsi/aha1542.c will do the trick.
One user has reported that ftape works (partially) the with Conner
TSM420R drive, which supports both QIC-80 (normal) and `QIC-WIDE' tapes. As
of right now, ftape provides only experimental support for
QIC-WIDE tapes, and you should be aware of this. Hopefully, the TSM420R
drive, and other QIC-WIDE drives, will be supported fully soon. If you have a
drive that can use QIC-WIDE tapes, are interested in getting it to work with
ftape, and not afraid of being ALPHA tester, drop Bas
<bas@vimec.nl> a mail, stating which drive you have.
NOTE: If you have a drive that works fine, but it is not listed here, please
send a mail to the HOWTO maintainer (<khp@pip.dknet.dk>).
These dedicated high-speed tape controllers are supported by
ftape:
Support for the FC-10 controller has been merged into the ftape
driver in version 1.12. See the RELEASE-NOTES and the
Makefile files in the ftape distribution. Since of version
2.03 of ftape, the FC-20 controller will work (but do check the
Release notes!).
The support for the MACH-2 controller was added in ftape-1.14d.
To use the IOmega Tape Accelerator II, use -DMACH2, and set the right
settings for I/O base, IRQ and DMA. This works (by the empirical testing of
Scott Bailey
<sbailey@xcc.mc.xerox.com>
), with at least ftape-2.02.
Generally, ALL drives that connect to the parallel port are NOT supported. This is because these drives uses (different) proprietary interfaces, that are very much different from the QIC-117 standard.
I used to write that high-speed controllers were not supported, but it seems
that they all are anyway. If someone knows of a high-speed tape controller,
that does not work with ftape, drop me a line.
The Irwin AX250L (and the IBM Internal Tape Backup Unit) does not work the
ftape. This is because they only support QIC-117, but not the QIC-80
standard (they use Irwin's proprietary servoe (Rhomat) format). I know
nothing about the Rhomat format, nor where to get any info on it. Sorry.
The COREtape light does not accept the initialisation commands, we're feeding it. This pretty much leaves the drive unusable.
ftapeIf you have a floppy controller which has a female DB37 connector on the
bracket (and some means of delivering power to the drive), you can use it with
ftape. OK, that sentence was not very obvious. Let's try it this
way: Some FDC's (the very ancient one's), have a DB37 connector on the
bracket, for connecting to external floppy drives.
If you make a suitable cable (from a quick glance on an FDC that I've got
lying around, it seems to be a straight 1-to-1 cable. However, your milage may
vary) from the DB37 connector (on the FDC) and to your external tape drive,
you can get ftape to control your tape drive.
This is because that from a program's view there is no difference between the
internal and the external connectors. So, from ftape's point of view,
they are identical.
The power conector is of the "mini" type, sitting on 3.5" floppy drives. As far as I can see on the board, the idea is that you plug one of the power connectors from the PSU to this connector on the board. If you want to use just a single cable, I'd suggest that you get a 50 wire cable, and use multiple wires for the power lines (and ground, for that matter).
ftapePCI motherboards and ftapeUnfortunately, some PCI motherboards cause problems when running
ftape. Some people have experienced that ftape would not
run in a PCI based box, but ran flawlessly in a normal ISA based 386DX
machine. If you have such a problem, please read the RELEASE-NOTES
file in the ftape distribution:
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