Here's a fun one! :) Travan tape drive.

I'd like to get this old Travan tape drive running in my pooter here if that's at all possible. Right now I'm using Gentoo Linux, kernel version 2.4.22. How old is this Travan tape drive? Well it came with it's own controller, which is an IDE Floppy controller, even says sone on the card itself. It's an old ISA card using only the 8 bit section of the ISA slot. Can't seem to figure out how to start it up. If anyone's got any ideas, I'm open.

Thanks in advance.

I'm sorry, but your drive is fully supported in both the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels.
In 2.4 it's under Character devices -> Ftape... and in 2.6 it's under Device Drivers -> Character devices -> Ftape.... I have no experience using an ftape drive, but TFM is here.

Yup. Looks like my problem could be that I might not have support for my ISA bus. I'm checking into that now. Thanks for your input.

The Travan Tape Drives were an IDE based device and do not require a special controller. The interface is not a DMA or UDMA device but, merely a standard IDE device. You should be able to connect it to an empty IDE port if you have one available. The company I work for used to use these types of drives in boxes that they called "servers", but in reality they were a white box workstation machine masquerading as servers.

Anyway to the bottom line it should work on any IDE interface. The most common was the TR-4. The capacity was 4GB native and 8GB compressed. They also were not very fast.

Good luck.

Coolies. Thanks much. I assumed that it was a standard IDE connection due to the size of the data cable that connected to it. Also the controller itself says "2mb Floppy Controller." The only thing that throws me off is that it uses a cable that doesn't have a pin that a floppy has, and is therefore plugged up and I cannot get it to fit into my normal floppy controller slot. A normal floppy cable should work though?

Also this is a Travan-3 drive, incase yer wondering.

Thanks for all yer help people!

Ahhhhh....
The Travan 3 does in fact use a floppy interface...my condolances. They are incredibly SLOW drives! My advice would be not to bother with the thing...but, if you are in it for the challange then full speed ahead. In a past life we wnt from TR2 drives to TR4 drives and skipped the TR3 drives completely.

If you can get your hands on a TR4 drive and a few tapes it might be more worth your time and be more functional. I haven't seen a tape cartidge for a TR3 drive in a long...long time.

Good luck!

Yeah, I kinda figured this thing would be @$$ slow.

So here's a question, if I plug the Travan drive into the floppy controller, do you know what it should show up as in /dev? Or does that depend on something that I'm just not aware of yet?

The only reason I'm so intent on getting this thing to work is because it's a tape drive at all. This is my own pet project that I get to play with in my spare time. If it were up to me I'd just grab like a little DDS2 or 3 drive and play with that. But that would cost money. I got this thing for free.

Thanks for all your input by the way.

I saw you post over in the Gentoo forum.

ftape is a selection that may be made in the kernel options when building the kernel initially, or when recompiling the kernel to include new options or funtions as required.

You can add the selection either through the command line make menuconfig. Then browse down the tree to Character devices|Ftape, the floppy tape driver|Ftape (QIC-80/Travan) support.

If that is all you want to modify the exit the menuconfig utility, say yes to save the configuration. Then perform the kernel compile make &&.......etc. Remember to have /dev/hda1 mounted to boot when you recompile the kernel. The procedure for copiling the kernel with the make command is in the install docs on the Gentoo website.

Hope this helps.

Coolies. That should help me. I'll go boot over into my Gentoo machine and have at it. Thanks much!