asking for help with getting the tape drive to work

[Aaron M. Stromas]

greetings,

before upgrading the kernel i went for the first time to use my tape drive to back up my box.  the dmesg output contained these lines:
 

hdd: Seagate STT8000A, ATAPI TAPE drive
...
ide-tape: hdd <-> ht0, 600KBps, 14*26kB buffer, 2600kB pipeline, 190ms tDSC

but neither dump nor mt recognise it:

mortirolo:/# mt /dev/ht0
mt: invalid tape operation `/dev/ht0'
mortirolo:/# mt /dev/hdd
mt: invalid tape operation `/dev/hdd'
mortirolo:/#

can somebody lend a helping hand explaining what is wrong and how to fix it?

for some reason i was convinced that i had a scsi tape drive, so i loaded the st module but got similar response:

mortirolo:/# mt /dev/st0
mt: invalid tape operation `/dev/st0'

i also noticed the following line in demesg's output:

Failed initialization of WD-7000 SCSI card!

does it have something to do with my tape troubles? tia,

-a
 

-- 
Aaron Stromas    | "Tick-tick-tick!!!... ja, Pantani is weg..."
Oracle Corp      |                             BRTN commentator
+1 703.708.68.21 |                              L'Alpe d'Huez
                                            1995 Tour de France