My Tape Drive is Malfunctioning

This article is a part of the Troubleshooting collection.

Problem

Your tape drive is in an unknown state

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