how does one use mt, to put a tape drive online?

[Andrew Falanga <afalanga@syracusenetworks.com>]

Like the heading reads, I want to know how I can use mt to put the unit
back online.  I've been having troubles with the Travan NS20 drive that
I first put in there.  So, I found an Exabyte 8mm 8205xls drive.  I put
that in.  To spare the long story, it was sitting in our stock room
because it had a tape in it.  Furthermore, our most senior and
experienced engineer could not get the tape to eject in a Novell
environment.  So he concluded that the tape was no good.  After doing
quite a little bit of research, based on something someone here told me,
that the Travan don't use standard SCSI command sets.  I set out to
researching this drive.

Exabyte had quite a bit of information.  No, I didn't read the entire
446 page pdf but I did find out that they use standard SCSI command
sets.  Anyway, I put the drive in and issued the command mt offline
(only because when I issued mt eject I got something like this, "unkown
command."  After issuing the command the tape drive very obediently
ejected the tape just as the mt man page said it would.

However, I'm not sure what to do now.  You see, I inserted another tape
(the tape that was in there belongs to a client) and issued mt status.
All I got was input/output error.  Is there a command I need to give
that's part of the mt options?  I didn't see anything in the man page
that jumped off the screen.  Or, do I simply use tar or dump and
everything will fall into place?

Thanks for any help that anyone can give me.

--
Andrew Falanga, A+, CNA, CNE (NetWare 4 & 5)
Network Engineer/Hostmaster
Networks.Com, Inc.