Marc -- Yes, I have tried to access it directly with tar, also mt commands to rewind, etc. Also note that initially I setup Bacula on this system and that worked so I know the drive is legit on that device name. I decided not to use Bacula because the maintenance of the MySQL db got really out of hand backing up a filesystem that had over 10million files on it, the db grew 7gb+ additionally for every full backup of this FS I had in the retention period.
In any event, here is the mt status:
# mt -f /dev/nst0 status
SCSI 2 tape drive:
File number=0, block number=0, partition=0.
Tape block size 0 bytes. Density code 0x46 (no translation).
Soft error count since last status=0
General status bits on (41010000):
BOT ONLINE IM_REP_EN
Dustin -- the output of the hardware I had provided initially was from the 'lshw' utility. I did notice this one error in /var/log/messages:
Aug 4 12:36:36 epassbackup2 kernel: st0: Sense Key : Illegal Request [current]
Aug 4 12:36:36 epassbackup2 kernel: st0: Add. Sense: Invalid field in cdb
