tar command: end of tape

[Michael Steele_2]

And your personal motto says it all

"..Questions are a burden to others.."

Dude, you got some issues

[OldSchool]

largefiles option refers to disk...this is tape...shouldn't matter.

patches might me an issue, althought nothing in the post points to that (yet)

no information provided as to type of tape / drive, so the first supposition would be that the tape is indeed full, so the "what happens if you follow the directions" is a good place to start, followed by:

does this happend with every tar command, or is this just one isolated case?

what happens if you use a new tape from the beginning?

If it's just this one, then the tape is most likely full (which could happen even with a new tape), if everything fails all the time, then the likelyhood of some kind of hardware issue goes up.

I'd start with full / bad tapes before moving on to cables / terminators, as there is nothing here that implicates them yet, either