On Wed, Nov 01, 2006 at 01:18:35PM -0500, Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
> I know questions about tape drives are possibly out of scope for
> code4lib, but I'll try anyway.
>

Yes, probably more appropriate for your local LUG, but, since you
asked...

> 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?
>

First thing to do is see whether the device is actually listed.  Does
a

    $ dmesg | grep scsi

or

    $ dmesg | grep -e '^st'

give anything useful?  What's in /proc/scsi/scsi and /proc/diskstats?

gabe