I'd like to thank everyone who helped me with this problem. It has finally been resolved.
I'm sure people are curious as to what happened (I know I would be), so here goes: After my last round of suggestions from people, I tried them all, but still with no success. I was talking with another tech friend who suggested that it sounded like it could be a firmware problem with the drive and that I try updating that. The tape drive was from IBM, so I went to the dowloads page for this unit and downloaded two .exe files that both created a bootable floppy disk (there was two as they were for two slightly different DDS4 tape drives). I tried both of the boot floppies and both of them tried to run the firmware update and both failed with the error "no supported drives found to update". This was despite the fact that I could see the tape unit in the list of drives detected. At this point I placed a service call with IBM, as I was getting really frustrated and it was looking more like a hardware problem (hey, if their firware updater can't find the drive, what hope do I have !). The tech who came out was really good and even though he had absolutely no Linux knowledge, he watched what happened when I tried to label a tape, etc. He suggested maybe SCSI cable and went and got a spare from his car, no good. He then called someone else and had a chat to them and they asked what it was connected to. Well it transpires that as I was using a "non-supported" SCSI controller to do my testing (I was using a standard Adaptec AHA-2940) they wouldn't support it. The tech guy was quite helpful though, he swapped the DDS4 tape drive, gave me a brand new one and told me to connect it back to the IBM server (with the "supported" SCSI card) and see how it went. If I was still having problems, call him back. So last night, I put the tape drive back into the server and scheduled a backup and IT WORKED ! I am now left wondering if the tape drive was faulty (it was replaced) or if it was something screwy with it not working on the two seperate SCSI controllers I tried it on outside of the server. Thanks again everyone and I did gain one thing from the exercise, I worked out how to disable compression on my tapes, so I should now get the full 20GB per tape. regards, Tony. ________________________________________________________________________ Want to chat instantly with your online friends? Get the FREE Yahoo! Messenger http://mail.messenger.yahoo.co.uk