CentOS - Mar 2006 - howto mount a scsi tape drive?

Hi,

after installing centos 4.2 I've noticed that my internal Seagate scsi DAT
72GB tape drive hasn't been recognised in /media or doesn't show up in
gnome
when putting in a tape.

Do I need to edit fstab first or load additional modules in the kernel
during startup?

regards, Geert
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On Thu, 9 Mar 2006 at 5:50pm, Geert Batsleer wrote
> after installing centos 4.2 I've noticed that my internal Seagate scsi
DAT
> 72GB tape drive hasn't been recognised in /media or doesn't show up
in gnome
> when putting in a tape.
>
> Do I need to edit fstab first or load additional modules in the kernel
> during startup?
One doesn't mount tape drives.  One manipulates, reads, and writes to them 
with tools like mt, dd, tar, cpio, ...

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University

Geert Batsleer wrote:
> Hi,
>
> after installing centos 4.2 I've noticed that my internal Seagate scsi 
> DAT 72GB tape drive hasn't been recognised in /media or doesn't
show
> up in gnome when putting in a tape.
>
> Do I need to edit fstab first or load additional modules in the kernel 
> during startup?
>
> regards, Geert
You don't mount tape drives.

To use it, you first have to know the dev assigned(!) which is usually 
/dev/st0 ... /dev/st7.
Use the mt command (man mt) to query and manipulate it try
$ mt -f /dev/st0 status 
for openers.  Try /dev/st1, /dev/st2.... as needed but /dev/st0 will 
probably be the right one.
Data is written to and read from the drive through the st module (man 
st); (lsmod to be sure it's loaded).
I haven't checked recently but there was once a bunch of examples in the 
texinfo system for the "tar" [(t)ape (ar)chive] command.
$ info tar

Good luck.