taper, and kbackup don't work!

[brent harding]

                                        Why won't taper and kbackup don't work, 
kbackup says that /dev/nqft3,
the device that initializes my tape, is rewinding and it wants a
nonrewinding device. Using the plain tar command it acts as if it's
nonrewinding. How do I fix this?
The taper program, when choosing make tape from the utilities menu says
invalid argument after attempting to erase a tape, nothing happens.