Hi folks I have been using mandriva 2006 for a little while now and decided to get a tape drive for backup why not? um I cant seem to get it to work, I downloaded the arkeia proggy but it doesnt see it, I seen a couple of things on mods? I ran an lsmod and got this

scsi_mod 123560 6 sg,st,sym53c8xx,scsi_transport_spi,sd_mod,libata

Sorry but it doesnt make any sense to me mmmm wouldnt be here if it did I suppose. So what would be the best solution for this? Thanks for any help muchly appreciated.

Welcome to LinuxQuestions.

For starters,
st is the tape drive module.
sym53c8xx is the SCSI controller module
The other modules are for the SATA controller, SCSI disk drives etc.

The device ID of the tape drive should be /dev/st0. A quick check to see if everything is working is via the mt command utility.
mt -f /dev/st0 status

If the command does not work then some trouble shooting is in order. Does the SCSI controller recognize the tape drive. Look at the output of the dmesg command to see if the OS recognizes the tape drive.

I typed in the command you gave me I got "/dev/st0 no such device or destination" sigh looks like trouble shooting. This did work in windows xp did a full backup with it so I do know it operates.

You can also check the MCC hardware section to see if the OS is recognizing the drive and its device id.