July 2003
Beginner to intermediate
874 pages
38h 13m
English
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Installing and Configuring a Tape Drive
External tape drives are “installed” simply by connecting them to the parallel, SCSI, USB, or FireWire port, as appropriate, and connecting power, although you may have to set jumpers to configure a SCSI drive for the proper SCSI ID and termination. Internal tape drives are 3.5- or 5.25-inch half-height devices, and require the same physical installation steps as any other externally accessible drive. The exact configuration steps required differ between ATAPI and SCSI interfaces, as described in the following sections.
Tip
Some tape drive manufacturers, including Seagate, recommend installing the backup software before installing the tape drive. But do not run the backup software before the drive is installed and recognized by the computer and operating system, or you may find that you need to reinstall the backup software in order for it to recognize the drive. Microsoft Backup has burned us this way more than once. Conversely, some tape backup software—typically that bundled with a tape drive—refuses to install unless a tape drive that it supports is already installed. Read the manual for the tape drive and the backup software before you begin the installation.