what turns on the clean light on tape drive

[John Bolene]

I ask one tape question and it spawns quite a few more.

Never used tape much, but slowly getting there.

Is it the number of tapes that are inserted?
The feet of tape that go past the head?

I have a Colorado PC tape drive and it never says that it needs cleaning. It probably needs cleaning also, but how? I've never seen any cleaning carts for it.

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Hi John,

It varies but it is typically the number of 'soft' errors; i.e. those in which a read error was detected but that the drive was able to recover from. When some threshhold is reached the warning is displayed.

Clay

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Hi John

The "Clean me" light is governed by read / write failures and when a certain number of failures occur then the drives embedded software stops trying to read / write to the media and activated the "clean me" light.

See man mt for magnetic tape interface - from here you can do things like checking that a tape is in the drive before doing a backup.

HTH

Paula