[arch-general] Unable to use tape drive

[Tom Gundersen]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 8:49 AM, Vitor Garcia
<vitorlopesgarcia at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have been trying to my Dell LTO-120 SCSI Tape Drive on Arch without
> success.
>
> I have tried to run $ modprobe st, but still, I have no /dev/st0 and
> neither /dev/nst0. dmesg | grep -i tape shows nothing too.
>
> Is there anything I'm missing here? Dell's user manual says that the
> drive should work out of the box on linux.

I have never used a tape-drive, so don't know exactly what should be going on.

However, the usual behavior is that the kernel tells udev that a new
device has appeared. Udev then modprobes the correct driver for you
based on the modalias of the device. There should be no need to
manually modprobe the st module (in some cases this is necessary, but
I'm pretty sure st is not one of them).

To get a better idea of what is happening, check `dmesg` for any
messages regarding your tape-drive. You could also do `rmmod st &&
modprobe -v st` and check the output to the console and dmesg for any
errors.

Finally, I'd find the path to your device in /sys and look in the
modalias file. This needs to match one of the modalias expressions you
see in `modinfo st`. A simple way to check this is to `modprobe -R
<your modalias>`. It should tell you the name of the modules it
matches with.

Cheers,

Tom