DLT7000 Clean Heads light

[Quentin Tatham]

Our DLT7000 drives have the Clean Tape Head LED come on after inserting Imation DLT IV tapes. These are new tapes, same brand as we used before, and they worked alright for a while.

We have three DLT drives used for backup: an HP DLT8000, a Compaq DLT7000, and a DEC TZ89.
Both the COmpaq and the TZ89 use the same version firmware (according to the L&TT software), but with different personalities. The HP drive has no problems at all.

All three drives had their firmware updated using L&TT. The two in question upgraded to V109, different personalities.

This appeared to fix the Head Clean LED issue, but backups ran so slow they were unusable. The tapes continuously seeked back and forth during backup.

I have since dropped the firmware revision back to V97 - the backup runs full speed, but Head Clean is back on.

The HP L&TT team are looking into it, but they have also directed me here. Hmmmph.

Has anyone else experienced this problem?

[Michael Tully]

We run V106 on our DLT7000 drives and don't experience any problems at all.

[Quentin Tatham]

Our drive uses the CPQ1 (Compaq) personality. Yours is probably the OMX1 personality, if it has V106 firmware.

I don't think using firmware from a tape drive with a different personality is a good idea. Has anyone out there done this?

[Nagarajan Balakrishnan_1]

Quentin,

Since, you mentioned new lots of tapes, there is a possibility of the media bits sticking on to the head. Cleaning the drives with cleaning tapes during the initial days have solved our problem. Normally, we had to do repeated head cleaning during the first 10-15 days whenever we put in new lots of tapes.

Trust this will help.

Baalki