I have a new segate SCSI tape drive and as I remember, tape drives
were seen as drive letters in the past. It seems as though that is no
longer the case, at least with windows NT 4 server. Are tape drives
seen as drive letters any more or not? If they are, on which OS would
it be. ( any windows and unix version boxes )

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Clarification of Question by bo_ba-ga on 07 Nov 2002 06:59 PST

Actually, I'd rather stay with windows OS's and skip the unix stuff.

No version of Windows shows tape drives as drive letters in Windows
Explorer by default.Not NT4,95,98,ME,2000 or XP.
This is so, because Windows has no direct access support for tape
drives. you are supposed to use backup software to write data onto
tape.
Most of the backup software programs that ship by default along with a
Tape Drive, allow you to view and use your tape drive as a drive
letter in Windows Explorer.But this is a feature provided by the
backup software and not Windows.
    
   Although a lot of software products are available in the market
that support this feature for Windows 9x/2K/XP, very few are available
that support Win NT 4.
I was able to find a product TapeDisk Corp's TD Raw NT, which installs
as a NT device driver for the Tape Drive and allows you to access it
through a drive letter.You can find an evaluation version on their
website.
        TapeDisk Corporation
        ( http://www.tapedisk.com/ )

I hope the above answer satisfied your needs.
If you need any clarifications, just ask!
:)

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Thanks, I do remember tape drives as drive letters, but I forgot about
the third party software. Excellent answer though, But I should have
been clear on my question. Thanks Theta-ga!

i cant answer your question comprehensively, but i will say that at
least one tape drive (and very likely others, but i dont know about
all of them) will show up as a drive letter in windows 2000. dont know
about which versions different drives can show up as letters for, dont
know how many drives will do this, dont know much... except that under
windows 2000 (and probably other os's) at least one tape drive i
remember will do this.