Tape drive complaining "clean me and retry again"

[wtwangbu]

Hi, there,
my lab has an old HP6400 48AL 4mm DDS2 tape autoloader. But I guess this is the best group which could probably answer my question.
I can use 'mt -t /dev/rmt/3mn rew' to rewind the tapes. However, when I tried to read or write the tapes with 'tar', the autoloader ran for a while and then the LCD showed the error message "Clean me and retry again". I applied the cleaning cartridge three times and got the same error.
How do you think of this problem? Is this a hardware failure or misconfiguration of SCSI?
I doubt that it is because of SCSI's misconfiguration since the rewinding is fine.
Thanks ahead.

-Tao

 

[tapedrivedoctor]

it sounds like the drive inside the autoloader needs replaced or repaired. The please clean me usually means that the drive cannot read or write data to the tape. It will be able to rewind and go forward without reading or writing. Hope this helps