Chewed tape or despooling

[kaon]

Hi there

I've been wondering if indeed my tapes *have* been chewing in my SC50 from ebay. I recall reading a post about tape "despooling", and have just spent an hour trying to find more info on it! :}

Looking under the tape cover I noticed a 3mm thick black strip running through part of the path the tape used to travel. I assumed this was pretty fatal and opened the cart to see what was going on. It appears the tape though still connected between the 2 spools, no longer travels the full path to the cart head and back. The rubber "guide" thing still does though. Is this despooling? Is is fatal. If not, then I would be very grateful for a cure to this, as it may mean the the ebay drive that keeps doing it to my tapes may not be totally evil after all!

With many thanks and best wishes

 

[gwootton]

kaon, usually when one of these tapes despools, the drive just doesn't stop when is winding one way or the other, and pulls one end out of one of the spools. if you are saying that the tape is still connected, but has just come off one of the guiding spools, not the main ones, then theoretically, you could "respool" it and get it to work. I have heard of someone doing this once. He said that he manually fed the tape back through it's path and reconnected it to the main spool. He said he was able to retrieve the data off the tape after this. I don't know whether I'd be able to do that, but he got it to work. Thats the extent of my knowledge on despools and respooling tapes. This was, however, when a tape was completely pulled from one of the main spools. Also, he had a different drive that would not despool the tapes. The drive was defective because it wasn't reading the End Of Tape listing on the tapes, so just kept on going, so even after you did that, assuming that the tape itself was repaired, you'd still need a drive that wasn't just going to go and do it again, but it may be worth a try. Hope that helps, Greg.