I'm trying to get a tape drive to work in Red Hat 9 at my school, and I can't seem to find any commands that will tell me what I'm supposed to do to find out where it is located or where I can configure it. we're running kernel 2.4.20-8. I just need to know how to install and confiugre it. The tape drive is an HP SureStore DAT24 and I'm not sure what the scsi card is. I can get that information if you need it. I just need a way to find out if linux is detecting and properly configuring the scsi card and how to get the tape drive working so that we're able to back up our information. Any help will be appreciated

-Jalsk

Do you have a /dev/st0 or /dev/nst0?

Look at the ouput of dmesg for messages on the SCSI card and tape drive.
The command
cat /proc/scsi/scsi

Should show the SCSI controller and drive information.

The output of lsmod should show if the SCSI controller module is being loaded.

You also need to verify the tape module st is loading also using lsmod

I have nst0 and st0, but it doesn't appear that it is loading the module for scsi because when I tried cat /proc/scsi/scsi, it said that the directory didn't exist. I need to know how to get the module installed and also how to mount, format, and set up backup jobs too once I get the tape drive working, if that wouldn't be too much of a problem. I think that the problem at this point is that it hasn't detected the card and therefore can't see that the tape drive exists.

Thanks for the help

-Jalsk

There generally is nothing special that needs to be done to get a tape drive to work once the scsi card is setup. You need to find out what version of scsi card you have. Login as root and post the output from
lspci -v;
and
ismod;

You do not mount a tape drive. I have only used a DLT tape drive with linux and they do not require formating. I don't know about DAT tapes.

There are lots of backup utilities. Check sourceforge. You can also use tar.
You should also install the tape utilites called mt.

mt -f /dev/st0 status