DDS cleaning tapes rejected

[Theo Markettos]

We have a brand new Seagate Scorpion STD224000N 24GB DDS-3 tape drive, and a 5 year old HP C1536A 2GB DDS-1 drive. Both are in need of cleaning. We've bought a new pair of C5709A DDS cleaning cartridges. But both reject the cartridges, rather than running a cleaning cycle with them. I can't get either of them to recognise the cleaning tapes, even though there doesn't seem to be anything you can do to them other than insert the tapes. They are just ejected as soon as the drive has tried to read the contents. This happens with both tapes on both drives. So have we just got duff cleaning tapes, or can anyone suggest anything?

Thanks,
Theo

[CA713937]

> We've bought a new pair of C5709A DDS cleaning cartridges.

That is the correct part number for cleaning DDS1 ... DDS4 drives.

> They are just ejected as soon as the drive has tried to read the contents.

That is the symptom of an expired cleaning cartridge, if it ejected in less than 20 seconds. A normal cleaning cycle takes 30-60 seconds.

Also, the cleaning light should go off if it did perform a cleaning.

I have an expired cleaning tape, and I noticed all the tape is on the right (looking at the cartridge with the door facing up). On my (almost) new cleaning cartridge, most of the tape is on the left. I'm therefore guessing that the tape all starts on the left, and after 50 cleanings all ends up on the right (just a guess).

It's strange that you see the behavior on both drives. That would lead me to believe the tapes are expired, or otherwise defective.

On the HP DDS drive, you can run HP Library & Tape Tools, and see what the device analysis section of the support ticket suggests.

[Theo Markettos]

> Also, the cleaning light should go off if it did perform a cleaning.

It hasn't come on on either drive, but the new one is reporting errors. The old one doesn't appear to have been cleaned for a very long time (possibly up to 5 years). I appear to be the first person using it to actually read the manual.

> On my (almost) new cleaning cartridge, most of the tape is on the left.

That's what I see - all the tape on the left. They've only been sent to us (in shrinkwrap) a few days ago, so they are brand new tapes.

> On the HP DDS drive, you can run HP Library & Tape Tools, and see what the device analysis section of the support ticket suggests.

Does this exist for Linux (i386)? I can only seem to find Windows versions on the HP site.

In the light of the above, would you advise returning the tapes to our supplier?

Thanks,
Theo

[CA713937]

>> you can run HP Library & Tape Tools...

> Does this exist for Linux (i386)? I can only seem to find Windows versions on the HP site.

Only Windows and HP-UX at the moment. A Linux port will be considered in the future.

> In the light of the above, would you advise returning the tapes to our supplier?

I have a hard time guessing what is at fault, since two tapes do the same thing in two drives. Since the cleaning lights were not on, it's hard to say it's not doing the cleaning. Also, the time for an actual cleaning verses an expired tape is not that different (perhaps only 10 seconds).

I assume the HP DDS cleaning cartridge has support similar to HP DDS media, so you could try calling the support line to see if they have any suggestions. (See URL)

http://www.hp.com/cposupport/information_storage/support_doc/lpg10025.html