TZ8x DLT III cartridge - torn leader

[Zane Healy]

What brand tape?  

I’ve seen this done by a tech on a DLT7000 drive, maybe on a DLT4000, I think they’re basically the same.  I seem to remember the tech used a 9-Volt batter to rewind a stuck tape.  The leaders as I recall are very similar for TK50, TK70, and DLTIII.

Zane




> On Sep 1, 2020, at 9:19 AM, Antonio Carlini via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> I've been trying to read data from some ~2000 era DLT III cartridges that were written on a TZ87.
> 
> 
> The first one read OK. But the second one failed and it seems that the leader was torn off. I tried a new drive and a second cartridge has failed the same way (the leader was there, now it's not).
> 
> 
> My immediate problem is that I now have two drives (a TZ88 and a TZ870 that fail POST (all LEDs blink). I guess I need to open them up, fish out the stray leader and fix them up somehow. Does anyone have any experience of doing this?
> 
> 
> My second problem is that I'd quite like to stop this from happening again. I'm guessing that it happened because the cartridge mechanism was jammed. I've just played around with a TK50-K cartridge and if I jam the two release mechanisms (using the "nose" of two pliers), open the "tape hatch" and gently pull the tape, it moves. Then I can "rewind" it and it's back to the way it was. I'm wondering whether this is safe to do on the DLT III tapes I still want to recover? Is it likely to at least tell me which tapes are likely to fail and which might load properly?
> 
> 
> My third problem i that I have two cartridges without a leader. Is this something that can be rectified?
> 
> 
> Thanks for any useful information.
> 
> 
> Antonio
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Antonio Carlini
> antonio at acarlini.com
>