Reading old QIC-80 tape using Linux with ftape

Question

I have an old Colorado 250MB tape drive, which connects to the PC's floppy controller, that I'd like to use to read a QIC-80 cartridge.

I know that very old versions of the Linux kernel used to have the ftape driver built into them (which would theoretically let me read the raw data from the tape), but I've never actually used it, and I'm not sure how to get it to work properly.

I've connected the tape drive to the PC, booted into Linux, and executed the following:

$ sudo modprobe ftape

That seemed to load the ftape driver successfully, but I still don't see any new devices under /dev that are related to the tape drive, e.g. /dev/qft0.

I then tried the following:

$ sudo /dev/MAKEDEV ftape

...but that still didn't create any new devices under /dev. I assume I must be missing something very simple. Does anyone have any previous experience getting ftape set up?

Answer 1

(Credit goes to @tofro for the answer) The actual command to activate ftape is:

$ sudo modprobe zftape

This loads both zftape and ftape, and creates all the necessary devices under /dev, so there's no need to run MAKEDEV.

Answer 2

To verify that the module has loaded, use cat /proc/devices and verify that there is an entry for device 27.

Once that has worked, use sudo /dev/MAKEDEV qft to create the device special files if they are not present.