>
> I connected HP SureStore DAT tape 6000 to our
> Linux 2.0.29 machine and did some testing with and found
> out that it did work only a short time.
>
> I started copying a gigabyte of data with command
> "tar cvf /dev/st0 *"
>
> it copied about 100-300 Megabytes of stuff, then suddenly
> Xterm - where I had tar-command running disappeared
> completely and process disappeared.
>
This probably does not have anything to do with the tape.
> After that I used mt-command "mt rewind" and "mt erase"
> Running "mt erase" for some 30 minutes, I tried to kill
> it but wasn't able to do that, kill -9 did not kill "mt erase"
> process.
>
The erase is just one SCSI command that takes a lot of time to execute.
The command is started and the process goes into uninterruptible sleep
(state D in ps and top). The process can't be killed until the command is
finished. So, what you observed here is correct behaviour.
Kai