Re: tape drive: Error with sense data

From: Jules (julesrichardsonuk_at_remove.this.yahoo.co.uk)
Date: 10/08/04 

Date: Fri, 08 Oct 2004 21:59:21 +0000

On Fri, 08 Oct 2004 19:49:01 +0000, JunkYard2 wrote:

> Could it be something simple like dirty tape r/w heads? I had this
> problem on a Travan drive just recently but on Windows 2000. The program
> would not write to the tape until I cleaned the heads. Cleaning tapes are
> not that cheap for small budget operations.

In my case it's possible I suppose - but I've run a cleaning tape through
each drive about 5 times without any improvement. I've actually got a
stockpile of about fifteen cleaning tapes, knowing that they can be
expensive to get hold of when you really need them :-)

> How long have you had the drive? I don't know that much about the type
> of drive you have but could the tape have stretched through use and
> caused the media to be unwritable. I know this happened a lot on 8mm
> drives.

Hmm... is 4mm DAT prone to stretching? I did only try a couple of old
tapes; I'll give it another go with a few different ones just to be sure.

I do suspect something on the drive or tape side of things - given the
tests I did with a narrow hard disk on the same bus, I'm pretty sure the
SCSI bus and at least the low-level SCSI drivers are OK. I'm really
starting to hate DAT though if that's another couple of drives that have
failed!

cheers

Jules

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