Problem with tape drive: illegal seek

[Christian Iversen <chrivers@iversen-net.dk>]

Whenever I use --verify for tar, I get problems. Specifically, I get 
"Illegal seek" when tar gets to the verify phase. 

I'm trying this on a Compaq SDT-10000 on an Adaptec AHA-3940U2x/395U2x, 
according to lspci.


The following simulates my backup script.. to some extend :)

[root@boreas]/tmp #dd if=/dev/urandom of=random-data bs=1024 count=1024                        
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1048576 bytes transferred in 0,324788 seconds (3228493 bytes/sec)
[root@boreas]/tmp #mt rewind
[root@boreas]/tmp #tar --create --verify --file /dev/tape random-data
tar: /dev/tape: Warning: Cannot seek: Illegal seek
[root@boreas]/tmp #dmesg | tail
program smartd is using a deprecated SCSI ioctl, please convert it to SG_IO
program smartd is using a deprecated SCSI ioctl, please convert it to SG_IO
program smartd is using a deprecated SCSI ioctl, please convert it to SG_IO
program smartd is using a deprecated SCSI ioctl, please convert it to SG_IO
program smartd is using a deprecated SCSI ioctl, please convert it to SG_IO
program smartd is using a deprecated SCSI ioctl, please convert it to SG_IO
program smartd is using a deprecated SCSI ioctl, please convert it to SG_IO
program smartd is using a deprecated SCSI ioctl, please convert it to SG_IO
program smartd is using a deprecated SCSI ioctl, please convert it to SG_IO
ReiserFS: md0: warning: vs-8115: get_num_ver: not directory item
[root@boreas]/tmp #

Should I look into the buggy'dness of this, or am I doing something wrong?

Please note that I can restore the data just fine, if I use tar. If I try to 
use dd, I get strange errors as well:

[root@boreas]/tmp #dd if=/dev/tape of=dump
dd: reading `/dev/tape': Cannot allocate memory
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes transferred in 3,699040 seconds (0 bytes/sec)

I hope you can help me.

-- 
Regards,
Christian Iversen