I'm sorry -- I somehow filed this away withot answering.

On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 3:59 PM, Brian Cuttler <brian AT wadsworth DOT org> 
wrote:
> read(4, 0x080887A0, 32768)                      Err#5 EIO

This is the read error.  As you can see, it doesn't give much detail
-- just EIO.  The subsequent

> ioctl(4, (('m'<<8)|1), 0x080469CC)              = 0

is a rewind request, which is successful.  I don't kow much about the
Solaris tape driver in general.  'man st' says:

     EIO       During opening,  the  tape  device  is  not  ready
               because  either  no  tape  is in the drive, or the
               drive is not on-line. Once  open,  this  error  is
               returned  if  the requested I/O transfer could not
               be completed.

Is there any indication of what this problem might be in the kernel logs?

Note that the actions Amanda is performing are:
 open
 rewind
 read 32k blocks until getting an EOF indication:
   /2:     read(4, 0x08170A40, 32768)                      = 0
 attempt to read the next block (which should begin the next file)

These steps aren't particularly easy to duplicate from the command
line, since 'dd' closes its input once it reaches an EOF.

Dustin

-- 
Storage Software Engineer
http://www.zmanda.com