I have got the tape drive working. First I used the kernel boot option "hdd=ide-scsi". Then I used: modprobe ide-scsi /dev/hdd to load the pseudo lower level SCSI device driver. Now I can access the tape using /dev/st0. This link was helpful: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/SCSI-2.4-HOWTO/sr.html#sratapi Thanks