Hello everyone,
First, thank you anyone who might be able to help : ) !!

here it is, I am using SCO at my business, and I back up everything to a tape drive. I want to do my cleaning of the drive, and i put in the cartridge to the drive, it recognizes it yet it will not engage the heads. Not sure if I am missing a command, or what the problem may be. Still learning, sorry

Thanks in advance,
Richard

Hi.

I have two DAT drives (Python mechanisms as I recall), and one streaming ("OnStream") tape drive. In all cases, when I place the cleaning cartridge in, the drive firmware recognizes the special cartridge, moves the cleaning tape across the heads, and that's it. You may be able to tell from the amount of cleaning tape on the spool (if you have a transparent cartridge).

I don't know what you mean by "engage the heads".

When all else fails, read the manual.

If you need to post more, provide the make and model, perhaps someone will recognize the drive ... cheers, drl

The cleaning cartridge has a special cleaning tape in it. You stick it in and the drive runs some of the tape over the heads, thus cleaning them. But do this enough and you run out of tape. The drive won't rewind a cleaning cartridge...it is used up. And so it is time for a new cleaning cartridge. Could this be your situation? Did you try another cleaning cartridge?

Thank you all for the help so far.
The tape is new, just bought yesterday. Imation Travan cartirdge. The drive is a HP T20 SCSI sequential device.
I ment 'engage the heads' by when i have put it in before, bam, starts working right away. This unfortunatley has not happened with this drive. I was told there may be a command to start it, tried but did not work
nsrjb -U (# of uses left) -S (slot#)

just said can not find nsrjb. so ya, again, lost : (

thank you for all your help,
Richard

Well, according to the manual, page 42:Link to HP SureStore T20 Models T20i, T20Xi, T20e, T20Xe User’s Guide in pdf format.

Which is odd. I have not seen instructions to not clean the heads of a tape drive before. Maybe it is self-cleaning or something.

hmm,isnt that odd. I looked in the manual you suggested, and thank you for doing that research, totally amazed at how nice you all are. Side tracked, sorry, i dont understand why it would tell you to not clean the drive, and no it is not a self cleaning unit. Weird. Could that be why the cartridge wont start?
Thanks again,
Richard