DAT not working

[Jason Pinkney]

Dear redhat-install,

my DAT tape drive used to work with my RHL system
but yesterday, I tried to read a tape and it got
messed up.  At first, it seemed fine.  It started
reading the tape in response to my command:
% tar tf /dev/st0 > listing
but it wouldn't finish and give me a prompt.  Inspection
of "listing" showed that it only made it a little ways
into the tar file (incomplete listing).
Since then, it has been impossible to communicate with.
Even after rebooting, the basic command
% mt -f /dev/st0 status
will either give no response and become a sleeping process
that can't be killed, or it will say:
/dev/st0: No such device or address

Can you tell where the problem is?

	Here is some output from dmesg:
% dmesg | grep scsi
kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k scsi_hostadapter, errno = 2
scsi0 : Adaptec AIC7XXX EISA/VLB/PCI SCSI HBA DRIVER, Rev 6.2.8
Attached scsi tape st0 at scsi0, channel 0, id 6, lun 0
scsi1 : SCSI host adapter emulation for IDE ATAPI devices
Attached scsi CD-ROM sr0 at scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 40x/40x writer cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray
(scsi0:A:6): 80.000MB/s transfers (40.000MHz, offset 32, 16bit)
scsi0:0:6:0: Attempting to queue an ABORT message
scsi0: Dumping Card State while idle, at SEQADDR 0x8
(scsi0:A:6:0): Queuing a recovery SCB
scsi0:0:6:0: Device is disconnected, re-queuing SCB
(scsi0:A:6:0): Abort Message Sent
(scsi0:A:6:0): SCB 3 - Abort Completed.
scsi0:0:6:0: Attempting to queue an ABORT message
scsi0: Dumping Card State while idle, at SEQADDR 0x8
(scsi0:A:6:0): Queuing a recovery SCB
scsi0:0:6:0: Device is disconnected, re-queuing SCB
(scsi0:A:6:0): Abort Message Sent
(scsi0:A:6:0): SCB 3 - Abort Completed.
scsi0:0:6:0: Attempting to queue a TARGET RESET message
scsi0:0:6:0: Command not found
scsi0:0:6:0: Attempting to queue an ABORT message
scsi0: Dumping Card State while idle, at SEQADDR 0x9
(scsi0:A:6:0): Queuing a recovery SCB
scsi0:0:6:0: Device is disconnected, re-queuing SCB
(scsi0:A:6:0): Abort Message Sent
(scsi0:A:6:0): SCB 3 - Abort Completed.
scsi0:0:6:0: Attempting to queue an ABORT message
scsi0: Dumping Card State while idle, at SEQADDR 0x9
(scsi0:A:6:0): Queuing a recovery SCB
scsi0:0:6:0: Device is disconnected, re-queuing SCB
(scsi0:A:6:0): Abort Message Sent
(scsi0:A:6:0): SCB 3 - Abort Completed.
scsi: device set offline - not ready or command retry failed after bus 
reset: host 0 channel 0 id 6 lun 0
scsi0:0:6:0: Attempting to queue an ABORT message
scsi0: Dumping Card State while idle, at SEQADDR 0x9
(scsi0:A:6:0): Queuing a recovery SCB
scsi0:0:6:0: Device is disconnected, re-queuing SCB
(scsi0:A:6:0): Abort Message Sent
(scsi0:A:6:0): SCB 2 - Abort Completed.

I think most of these errors were generated while I was pushing the
eject button and sending "mt -f /dev/st0 status" commands.

any help would be appreciated!
thanks,
Jason

-- 
Dr. Jason Pinkney
Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy
Ohio Northern University
419-772-2740   http://www2.onu.edu/~j-pinkney