Matt Herzog wrote:
> Thanks. I have rebooted several times. I have tried 2 brand new tapes.
> The drive exercises the tape vigorously . . . much rewinding and
> retensioning seems to occur. It makes plenty of noise doing this. If
> I pull the tape and reinsert, the same activities happen. Odd to see
> no error messages from dmesg if the drive curcuitry is really fried.
> No?

Not necessarily.  If there's something bad with the head, then the drive
could power up and check out just fine, but fail to operate.  It does seem
odd that the drive reports an I/O error right away when attempting to do any
operation and dmesg doesn't report anything, though.  I see there's a
diagnostic utility that runs under Linux at
http://www.seagate.com/support/tape/utils/index.html, maybe give that a try
and see what it says.  Maybe also see if there's a firmware upgrade
available -- your driver could be sending a reset or init sequence that the
drive isn't handling properly.

Does your user's manual say that the drive will give any external indication
of failure (flashing activity light or anything)?  I'm just wondering if the
tape loading fails after three attempts or something and the drive just
posts a load error in an internal status register and that's why it seems to
load OK but immediately returns the error on the query.  Have you tried
rebooting and then checking the status without inserting a tape?  That
should return some kind of "drive not ready" or "drive empty" status.  Wish
I knew more, but my tape drive's on an old NT box I keep up for hysterical
porpoises, so I don't have any hard clues about it under NetBSD.

Good luck!
-- Tracy