Hi Paul

Paul Bijnens wrote:

Normal scsi voodoo:  is the cable terminated?  Did you sacrifice
a chicken? ...

Can you read/write to the tape when not using amanda tools, e.g.
simple:   dd if=somefile bs=32k of=/dev/st0

I must say that my first thought really was the chicken ;-).

$ mt -f /dev/st0 status
SCSI 2 tape drive:
File number=0, block number=1, partition=0.
Tape block size 65536 bytes. Density code 0x42 (no translation).
Soft error count since last status=0
General status bits on (1010000):
 ONLINE IM_REP_EN

$ mt -f /dev/nst0 setblk 32768

and (while still thinking about the chicken):

 $ amlabel tapeBackup tapeBackup-01
labeling tape in slot 1 (/dev/nst0):
rewinding, reading label, reading label: Input/output error
rewinding, writing label tapeBackup-01, checking label, done.

Let's start dumping ;-)
Thank you!
Arnd