I'm trying to get a super-DLT 320 tape drive working on a Dell PowerEdge 2600
running NetBSD 1.6U compiled from a week or so ago.

My first test of the tape drive used dump to backup a number of our servers and
it managed to do 42 file systems (around 150GB) before dieing about 2/3rds of
the way through the 43rd with an I/O error.  The following message was logged.

st0(ahc0:0:6:0):  Check Condition on CDB: 0x0a 00 00 80 00 00
    SENSE KEY:  Media Error
   INFO FIELD:  145031168
 COMMAND INFO:  4953956 (0x4b9764)
     ASC/ASCQ:  Write Error

My first reaction was that the tape had filled up and given the amount of data
written was approximately 50% of the tape capacity (when using compression), I
thought that maybe the problem was that compression is not on by default on
this drive.

To test it some more I ran a script that just wrote a raw disk partition
repeatedly to the tape drive.  I tried this test a few times and each time it
died with a similar error to the above after writing just 2-3GB.  So perhaps
the first error I got was not due to a full tape.

The "Check Conditions" I get are not always the same.  Here are a couple of
variations.

st0(ahc0:0:6:0):  Check Condition on CDB: 0x0a 00 01 00 00 00
    SENSE KEY:  Media Error
   INFO FIELD:  65208320
 COMMAND INFO:  36014 (0x8cae)
     ASC/ASCQ:  Write Error

and

st0(ahc0:0:6:0):  Check Condition on CDB: 0x10 00 00 00 02 00
    SENSE KEY:  Media Error
 COMMAND INFO:  40243 (0x9d33)
     ASC/ASCQ:  Write Error

Can anyone tell me what the above errors mean (or point me to a reference
where I can work it out for myself).

For completeness, the SCSI controller and tape drive probe as follows...

ahc1 at pci6 dev 3 function 0
ahc1: interrupting at irq 11
ahc1: aic7899: Ultra160 Wide Channel A, SCSI Id=7, 32/253 SCBs
scsibus0 at ahc1: 16 targets, 8 luns per target
...
st0 at scsibus0 target 6 lun 0: <QUANTUM, SDLT320, 3131> tape removable
st0: drive empty
st0: sync (25.00ns offset 62), 16-bit (80.000MB/s) transfers

Thanks,

Duncan