Does Zorin 16.2/17 support Adaptec AHA-2940 SCSI card (aic7xxx driver) for tape drives?

Hardware Support
1

Hello,
I am planning to use an old Adaptec AHA-2940 PCI SCSI card together with a TEAC DDS tape drive (DAT46 / DAT90, DDS-1) in order to recover data.

As far as I know, this card requires the aic7xxx driver in the Linux kernel, and the tape drive should appear as /dev/st0 with the st driver.

  • Does Zorin 16.2 (kernel 5.15) still include and support the aic7xxx driver?
  • How about Zorin 17 (kernel 6.x) — is the driver still available, or has it been removed?
  • If it has been dropped, what would be the recommended way to use this hardware with Zorin?

Any confirmation or advice would be greatly appreciated.

2

I'm not familar with this. I found this solution in askubuntu but there is not mentioned the ubuntu version.

If you need kernel 5.15, you can also install it in Zorin 17 from the repo.

For kernel 6.8.0 the aic7xxx driver is shown so it should be included in Zorin 17.3:

3

This Driver should be included at least till Kernel 6.12.

4

The information provided in the previous posts suggests, the driver is in Zorin OS 17, but likely will be deprecated in OS 18. I suggest upgrading to OS 17, and staying with that OS, until support drops in 2027.

PS: I'm really surprised there are folks still fiddling with old tape drives!

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5

In mainline kernel 6.17 it is still included.