You Need The Mt Utility; Testing Your Dlttape Drive; Tar A File To The Cartridge, And Attempt To Restore It - Quantum DLT 1 Install Manual

device will overwrite the previous archive.
/dev/nsti is the no-rewind device. It can be used to create several archives, one after the other, on a single
DLTtape cartridge. You can then select a particular archive to restore using the fsf and bsf operations
provided by the mt command. This will let you locate a particular archive by seeking to the correct
filemark using high-speed locate.
Check if you already have the device-special files:
# ls -l /dev/*st?
crw-rw---- 1 root tape 9, 128 Sep 22 15:33 /dev/nst0
crw-rw---- 1 root tape 9, 129 Sep 22 15:33 /dev/nst1
crw-rw---- 1 root tape 9, 0 Sep 22 15:33 /dev/st0
crw-rw---- 1 root tape 9, 1 Sep 22 15:33 /dev/st1
If you don't see these files on your system, you'll have to build them using the MAKEDEV script, which
is also usually found in /dev and can be set up using the following command construct:
# ./MAKEDEV st
This will typically make the device-special files for up to eight SCSI tape drives, st0 through st7.
On some Linux distributions, you have to run MAKEDEV once for each drive, as in the following
example:
# ./MAKEDEV st0

You need the mt utility

On Linux, mt is an indispensable utility when working with DLTtape drives.
If you don't have it already on your system, install the mt package from your Linux distribution. Currently,
there are at least two flavors of mt available for Linux. There is an mt-st package that ships with many
distributions. GNU mt is another flavor that ships with Debian; there are probably others.
GNU mt responds to a version inquiry in the following:
# mt --version
GNU mt version 2.4.2
For mt-st, the version inquiry has the following response:
# mt -v
mt-st v. 0.5b
We find that either mt flavor is adequate for performing basic operations on DLTtape drives. There are
minor syntax differences, however. The first thing you should do after installing mt is to read the manpage.
It provides a vast assortment of useful commands that are too numerous to list here.

Testing your DLTtape drive

If you've come this far, it's time to test that your newly-installed DLT tape drive responds properly to some
basic commands.
Perform an inquiry on the drive:
# mt -f /dev/st0 status
drive type = Generic SCSI-2 tape
drive status = 1090519040
sense key error = 0
residue count = 0
file number = 0
block number = 0
Tape block size 0 bytes. Density code 0x41 (unknown).
Soft error count since last status=0
General status bits on (41010000):
BOT ONLINE IM_REP_EN
You won't see the BOT keyword in the last line unless there's a cartridge in the drive. Take care of that and
try again.

Tar a file to the cartridge, and attempt to restore it: