I know questions about tape drives are possibly out of scope for
code4lib, but I'll try anyway.

Do I need to tweak my Linux kernel in order for my computer to
recognize my internal SCSI tape drive?

I recently purchased a new piece of hardware from Dell. As requested,
it came completely clean. I installed Fedora 5 on it, and it is up an
running. The hardware came with a PowerVault (SCSI) tape drive, and
for the life of me I can't get anything written to the tape. I use
this command:

   tar cvf /dev/st0 /

But tar comes back and says there is no such device. I use MAKEDEV to
create devices (from SCSI ID 0 - 7), and while files are created in /
dev I still get "no such device" errors.

Maybe I need turn something on in a kernel configuration file
somewhere? I think I see the device listed during the BIOS boot
process. Do I need a driver? What am I doing wrong? What am I missing?

--
Eric Morgan