HP DAT72 tape drive will not recognize new HP DAT72 tape

[Brian Bopp]

We have a DAT72 SCSI internal tape drive and its worked fine for the past 2.5-3 yrs. We do a daily backup on it consisting of about 30GB of data using NTBackup built in to Server 2003 R2.

It has not been cleaned at all until the last few months. The "Ready" green and "Clean" amber lights both blink simultaneously and wouldn't shut off even after inserting a cleaning tape 5x.

I've done the clean the drive 5 times and tried to load a tape again. Both lights come back on after the old tape is inserted.

Bought brand new HP DAT72 tapes. When new tape is inserted all drive lights go off after it finishes loading the tape and no tape shows up in Computer Management to add.

Any ideas what's going on here?

[Marino Meloni_1]

best to troubleshoot using LTT, it allow you to run tests in order to validate the HW is good or not

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storageworks/ltt/index.html

[Brian Bopp]

Yes, I've run LTT and with the old tapes that are recognized and the drive writes 109 blocks and errors out saying bad media or device.

With the new tapes that Windows doesn't recognize, LTT errors out directly after it begins write/read test writing 0 blocks and ending in the same message, bad media or device.

[Brian Bopp]

May I initiate a RMA for the drive and get it repaired?