Unfortunately the mt command on HP-UX does not have a status option ( it
does on Solaris ),
look at the man page for mt.   you could experiment with some of the
available options, say
rew or fsr which will probably give an I/O error if there is no tape in the
drive.   ioscan only tells
you that the tape drive is configured.

        E.G. mt  -t   /dev/rmt/0mnb  rew

 ( where  0mnb is the tape device you are interested in ).

Bill


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