Just to report back:  I ended up contacting HP support and they did some remote 
diagnostics on the tape drive and confirmed that it has gone to a better place. 
 Thankfully we're still within our warranty period so they'll send me a 
replacement.

Thanks for the replies, though.  Much appreciated.

Johan

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-amanda-users AT amanda DOT org [mailto:owner-amanda-users AT amanda 
DOT org] On Behalf Of Johan Booysen
Sent: 26 October 2009 12:44
Cc: amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
Subject: RE: FAILED "No new tape."

Thanks Jon and Dustin for your replies.

It seems to be a hardware issue.  We have two identical tape drives so I'm just 
doing some testing to see if I can narrow it down to the tape drive or the 
cable.

Best regards,

Johan


-----Original Message-----
From: djmitche AT gmail DOT com [mailto:djmitche AT gmail DOT com] On Behalf Of 
Dustin J. Mitchell
Sent: 25 October 2009 14:57
To: Johan Booysen
Cc: amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
Subject: Re: FAILED "No new tape."

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