Operation
Cleaning the Tape Heads
23
Cleaning the Tape Heads
If excessive magnetic dust or debris collects at one or more of the tape heads, your drive may not be
able to read from or write to tape. To avoid this situation, you must clean the tape heads on your
DAT drive
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After the first four hours of tape movement of a new cartridge.
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After every 25 hours of read/write operation.
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Whenever the rectangular, green Cartridge-status LED flashes during operation.
To clean the tape heads on your DAT drive, use only a Certance-qualified DDS DAT cleaning car-
tridge designed for DAT drives, such as Certance Model CDMCL.
After you insert the cleaning cartridge, the drive detects that the cartridge is a cleaning cartridge,
then loads and runs the cartridge for about 30 seconds. When cleaning is complete, the drive ejects
the cartridge.
Each time the cleaning cartridge is loaded, a new, unused portion of cleaning tape is advanced
over the entire tape path. The drive does not rewind a cleaning cartridge. After about 30 cleaning
cycles the entire tape is used up and you must purchase a new cleaning cartridge.
If you insert a cleaning tape that has been used up, the drive ejects the tape without completing a
cleaning operation. This process takes just under 25 seconds.
LED Codes
As Figure 12 on page 24 shows, the front panel of the DAT24 tape drive has two rectangular LEDs.
These two indicators provide information about both normal and error conditions.
•
The yellow rectangular LED indicates the condition of the tape drive.
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The green LED indicates the condition of the tape cartridge.
NOTE: A slowly flashing green LED may indicate that a tape is damaged or is nearing the end
of its life. If cleaning the head does not correct the flashing LED condition, replace the cartridge.
The slowly flashing LED does not indicate a loss of data, nor does it indicate SCSI problems.
NOTE: Do not use an audio DAT cleaning cartridge. The drive cannot recognize it.
NOTE: The external DAT24 drive also has a round, green power-on LED on the front panel.
