SONY AIT 460V Tape drive on Rhel 5, tar fails mt OK

We've being having issues in the office with a SONY 460V IDE tape drive in a test Fujitsu Siemans Econnel 100, Red Hat RHEL 5.2 machine.

All the comands on Sonytape tool and mt ( mt-st yum rpm package) seem to work OK

However run tar -cvf /dev/st0 anyfile' or dd or cpio
the command stops after a few mins with:

'tar: /dev/st0: Cannot open: Input/output error
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now'

After this the device seems to be dropped and you can no longer see the drive

We found that
rmmod ide_scsimod
probe ide_scsi
got the drive working again, but tar never completed

After a lot of forum bashing , firmware uploads and trail and error this is the fix for the

Contary to what cruzeta says later on http://forums.fedoraforum.org/archive/index.php/t-145201.html this fix worked for us...............


remove DMA support from IDE

vi /etc/grub.conf

#boot=/dev/sda
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (2.6.18-92.1.22.el5)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-92.1.22.el5 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb ide=nodma quiet crashkernel=1728M@16M


also add modprobe-scsi to /etc/rc.local
#
touch /var/lock/subsys/local
# add for tape drive
modprobe ide-scsi

test with ./sonytape /dev/st0 -t ( should give you an ouptu file called nori_trace.txt )

then try
tar -cvf /dev/st0 /home/*

you should no longer see tar: /dev/st0: Cannot open: Input/output error
or anything in /var/log/messages

good luck