onstream adr 50gb

I just inherited one of these drives and about 50 of the tapes. I can't seem to get the damn thing to work though. I got the osst driver loaded and the aic7love for the adaptec card it is connected to. I am able to send and get status. I can rewind tape, I can erase tape, I can retension tape, but I can't seem to write to tape. It always errors out at some point. The latest with this error:

osst0:E: Failed to find valid tape media osst0:E: Write error not recovered osst0:W: Command with sense data: osst0: Current: sense key=0x2 ASC=0x4 ASCQ=0x1 osst0:I: 3 unrecovered errors 4 recovered errors in 582 frames written

Then a little while later I got this:

(scsi0:A:6:0): Unexpected busfree in Command phase SEQADDR == 0x165 osst0:W: Warning 70000 (sugg. bt 0x0, driver bt 0x0, host bt 0x7). osst0:I: This warning may be caused by your scsi controller, osst0:I: it has been reported with some Buslogic cards. osst0:I: Device did not become Ready in open

I think I was trying to get status and I got a "Service temporarily unavailable."

Now the tape is just moving around back and forth I think and I can't get it to stop...I tried to get tar to read from it and now it's stuck and won't die. I'll probably have to reboot!!

I have 0 experience with tape drives. Certainly though they should be more dependable than this. What am I doing wrong?! Anyone got experience with these drives? Especially on an AMD64...