problems with tape drive

[Nigel Wade]

Dana Holland wrote:
> I'm having problems accessing the tape drive on our Dell box.  We're 
> running AS 4.  It's a Seagate DAT-72 SCSI drive.  It appears that the 
> system is recognizing the drive during bootup, and that it's being 
> assigned the name of st0.  But none of the "mt" commmands work - I get 
> "device not found".  I've googled it, but can't seem to find any 
> information on the next step to take.  Any ideas?
> 

The first step is to see if the st kernel module has been loaded. Run 
lsmod and check that it is there. You should also see SCSI device 
drivers for whatever SCSI card you have. The scsi_mod module should have 
a dependency on the st module and your SCSI card driver.

Check whether the st module has created the necessary filesystem entries 
in /dev/. There should be a /dev/st0, /dev/nst0 at the very least.

Look in /proc/scsi/scsi, this should list all the scsi devices found. 
There ought to be an entry for your tape drive. For example, one of our 
HP DAT drives looks like this:
Host: scsi5 Channel: 00 Id: 01 Lun: 00
   Vendor: HP       Model: C5683A           Rev: C908
   Type:   Sequential-Access                ANSI SCSI revision: 02


-- 
Nigel Wade, System Administrator, Space Plasma Physics Group,
             University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK
E-mail :    nmw at ion.le.ac.uk
Phone :     +44 (0)116 2523548, Fax : +44 (0)116 2523555