Hey Bob and Tim,
Thanks so much for your feed back. In the end we tried the Quantam desktop SAS recorder and that worked first time. Therefore there must have been an issue with the cable or the internal device itself (could have been an older firmware that I could not flash). We returned both.
Therefore it will forever remain another LTO mystery.
In response I did try terminal, LTFSmanager and BRU demo and failed with all initially.
Thanks again,