i have an ibm machine with dds4 drive running sco. i bought new hp dds4 tape for my back-up. the new tapes are not being read by the system, it says tape error, no such device. i've already clean the drive several times but still the same error occur. i've tried to use the same tape on our windows server with a dds4 drive and it is reading the sames tape and have done back-up using it. i'm not sure if it is the drive itself is damage. i just wanna ask how to check if the hardware is not being recognized by the system.
You used the tape that you did a backup with Windows? It probably won't read it on UNIX. Take a new tape, put it in the drive, see if you can send a tar to it.
It should be able to overwrite the tape - my concern was that you did a backup on windows, then brought the tape to UNIX and attempted to read it which may not work and make you think it's the tape drive versus format of the tape.