Making a DAT/DDS Tape Drive Work on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

We could see messages about the tape drive in dmesg, but it wasn’t giving the device name. We tried working with /dev/st0, but we kept getting errors. Everything seemed right, but it didn’t work.

It turns out our SCSI card was the problem. It wasn’t being properly recognized. After a tip, we tried the following:

/sbin/modprobe aic7xxx

Where “aic7xxx” is appropriate for our Adaptec card.

We checked lsmod and found the aic7xxx stuff properly initialized there (shortened output):

/sbin/lsmod
Module                  Size  Used by    Not tainted
st                     30612   0 (autoclean)
aic7xxx               127232   0
scsi_mod              126812   4 [st aic7xxx aacraid sd_mod]

Then I went looking for the tape drive here:

cat /proc/scsi/scsi 
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
  Vendor: DELL     Model: PERCRAID RAID5   Rev: V1.0
  Type:   Direct-Access                    ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Host: scsi1 Channel: 00 Id: 06 Lun: 00
  Vendor: SEAGATE  Model: DAT    DAT72-000 Rev: A030
  Type:   Sequential-Access                ANSI SCSI revision: 03

Finally, dmesg shows the following:

st: Version 20010812, bufsize 32768, wrt 30720, max init. bufs 4, s/g segs 16
Attached scsi tape st0 at scsi1, channel 0, id 6, lun 0
(scsi1:0:6:0) Synchronous at 40.0 Mbyte/sec, offset 32.
st0: Block limits 1 - 16777215 bytes.