Dissecting a TZ30 drive

Chuck> I have on my desk a TZ30 (half height TK50 drive) and it Chuck> has a tape inside of it. Powering it up and pressing unload Chuck> starts a rewind and then it gives up (all lights Chuck> flash). I'm guessing the tape presense sensor is dirty or Chuck> otherwise disabled but to get to it I really would like to Chuck> remove the existing tape. Unfortuately I cannot find how to Chuck> manually "unlock" the drive. Clues anyone? I extracted a TZ30 from a "storage expansion" box that used to be connected to a alpha station. The drive is SCSI so that it was trivial to use it in my PC. The load system seems extremly unreliable to me: any small failure when loading/unloading the tape might easly require disassemble it. I performed a deep dust cleaning by disassembling it. I guess it is fairly easy to disassemble and re-assemble it. Cheers, -- *** Rodrigo Martins de Matos Ventura <yoda(a)isr.ist.utl.pt> *** Web page: http://www.isr.ist.utl.pt/~yoda *** Teaching Assistant and PhD Student at ISR: *** Instituto de Sistemas e Robotica, Polo de Lisboa *** Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisboa, PORTUGAL *** PGP fingerprint = 0119 AD13 9EEE 264A 3F10 31D3 89B3 C6C4 60C6 4585