AFbackup keeps ejecting tape

[Noah]

AFBackup keeps ejecting the tape
OS: freeBSD 4.8-STABLE
afbackup-3.3.5


Hi,

okay I am having a difficult time here. I must be
misunderstainding something. I have one tape drive and
two clients. one of the client machines dis also the
server which has a single tape drive attached to it.
the tape drive handles only one cartridge at a time. I
am rotating backups between 3 separate cartridges. each
weekly backup should be able to fit on one tape only
since the tapes are 50GB each.

I have already used these tapes for backup. The tape
recently rotated.and as soon as the tape was inserted I
received mail to run the cartready program and did that.

then afbackup ejects the tape from the drive and sends
me the following message:

"The device /dev/sa0 on host hostname.domain.com is not
ready for use. You are requested to check the device
for possible errors and to correct them.

Best regards from your backup service. "

do I need to do more then cartready? Am I missing a
step to rewind the tape?

Any ideas here

thanks,

Noah