Tape Drive Woes

[Stephen Hargrove <stephen virtual-attorney com>]

I've been struggling with the problem off and on for the past several days, and
I'm hoping someone here can help me out.

My machine is all SCSI and it has a tape drive.  The drive is recognized by the
BIOS and during startup, but the system is completely non-responsive when I try
to access /dev/st0.  Here's the only mention of the drive from dmesg:

(scsi0:0:4:0) Synchronous at 10.0 Mbyte/sec, offset 15.
   Vendor: Seagate    Model: STT8000N        Rev: 3.22
    Type:    Sequential-Access                     ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Detected scsi tape st0 at scsi0, channel 0, id 4, lun 0

I've tried using cpio to write something to /dev/st0, but it kicks out the
following:

$ find /home -print | cpio -o > /dev/st0
found end of tape.  To continue, type device/file name when ready

I downloaded and tried lnxbackup, and it kicked out the following error:

tar (grandchild): Cannot open archice /dev/st0/mybackup.tar.tgz: Not a directory
tar (grandchild): Error is not recoverable: exiting now

During neither of these procedures does the tape drive ever make a sound.  Can
someone please tell me what I'm missing?

Thanks!
--
steve