Thanks for the advice, I did put the wrong command in the last e-mail,
I used typed amrestore, rather than amrecover.

The only thing I'm not sure on is the -f option to amrestore

The man page states:
-f     Do a rewind followed by a fsf <fileno> ... restore an image.

I cannot work out what this represents (I'm sure it's obvious :))

I stabbed at it and just entered 1 and it seems to work ok.

# cd /tmp/restore
# amrestore -p -f 1 file:/path/to/tape/tape01  |  tar -xpGvf - .

Thanks for the help

Mark