>I finally turned my attention to the 3494. I found I had to manually
>eject a tape from one of the two drives. To my dismay, this did not
>fix my waiting for tape problem.

The drive may be suffering a Load/Unload problem and need repair (as
one of mine recently did).  Of course, once you manually unload a tape
you should put it back into its cell (whose address you can find from
the 3494 control panel, database inquiry).  You should let the 3494
reinventory the drives and the wall where the tape was manually stored
so that it knows where things are, and can thus satisfy mounts.
Check the tape's category code and make sure it's not a "missing tape"
one (08).
    Richard Sims, BU