On Sun, Oct 25, 2009 at 6:33 AM, Johan Booysen <johan AT matrix-data.co DOT uk> 
wrote:
> I would really appreciate some advice on how to troubleshoot this problem.

1256320978.957231: taper: putresult: 18 NEW-TAPE
1256321083.042522: taper: putresult: 10 FAILED

It looks like the taper ran for about 105s before failing, so it
probably encountered an EIO or other tape error at that point.  I
would guess this is a SCSI error, because the device doesn't seem to
recover after that -- all dumps fail immediately.

I would check kernel logs for info about the errors, and also try
using 'dd' to write to the drive.

Dustin

-- 
Open Source Storage Engineer
http://www.zmanda.com