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.