My Tape Drive is Malfunctioning
From The Open Source Backup Wiki (Amanda, MySQL Backup)
This article is a part of the Troubleshooting collection.
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Problem
Your tape drive is in an unknown state
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Solution
You can use a low level command to check the status of your tape drive, substituting the device name of your drive. On FreeBSD:
mt -f /dev/rsa0 status
Similarly, on Linux:
mt -f /dev/nst0 status
