troubleshooting tape

I just had a Seagate Tapestor 40Gb Travan drive installed in my
RH7.3 box. The drive is detected on /dev/ht0 which is correct.
When I ran mt -f /dev/ht0 reten it returned an message aboutan I/O=20
error and an unrecoverable error. When I tried to create an archive=20
( I should have known better ) I got:

[root@localhost root]# tar cvf /dev/ht0 home
tar: home: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: /dev/ht0: Wrote only 0 of 10240 bytes
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

/var/log/messages showed:

Nov 7 22:12:24 localhost su(pam_unix)[5745]: session opened for user roo=
t by=20
holtzm(uid=3D500)
Nov 7 22:13:06 localhost kernel: ide-tape: ht0: I/O error, pc =3D a, ke=
y =3D 5,=20
asc =3D 22, ascq =3D 0

These were the only entries I could associate with the last command.
My old HP Travan 20 Gb worked fine until it finally gave up the ghost.

I haven't a clue how to begin trouble shooting this. Any pointers
would be appreciated. Thanks.

--=20
Bob Holtzman