[geeks] A bad month for tape

[Phil Stracchino]

In fact, this seems to be a year for hardware failures overall.  :p  Our
LaserJet 4 died (but then came back to life), one of our computers fried
its PS/2 ports, my VXA1 tape drive dropped off the bus and died a few
weeks ago, and now my LTO1 drive ingested a tape last night.  (The drive
is a Dell Powervault 110T external unit; the internal mechanism itself
is a HP Ultrium-1 drive.)  I stripped it down, extracted the tape, and
figured out how the loading mechanism works, but discovered that the
drive had snapped the tape about a meter back from the leader bar.

The good news:  I now know how to disassemble and reassemble an LTO tape
cartridge and re-attach the leader bar, and I now have a pretty good
understanding of the internal mechanical working of an LTO drive.

The bad news: something is still wrong.  I loaded a cleaning tape to
test it, and once again it ripped several meters of tape off the
cartridge.  It seems it's making several attempts to catch the leader
bar, and once it does, instead of slowly feeding the leader into the
drive, the mechanism goes directly to full speed, slams the leader
carrier violently through the mechanism and rips the leader off the end
of the tape.

And then, on about the sixth time I had to fish the leader carrier back
through the mechanism, I fumbled and accidentally broke off a tiny
(about 1mm) but crucial plastic pin.  The pin is a cam guide for the
little roller that puts preload pressure on the leader carrier during
the mount operation, and without a precision drill press to replace it
with a steel pin, I can't see any way to repair it.  The cross-section
is too tiny for glue to have any realistic chance of working, even if I
had solved the loading problem, which I haven't.


Bah, humbug.

So now I need to replace my LTO drive as well as everything else we've
replaced this year.


Will shit PLEASE JUST STOP BREAKING for a while?  We're trying to put
together a house purchase here.



-- 
        Phil Stracchino                CDK#2
 Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
 phil.stracchino at speakeasy.net   alaric at caerllewys.net
 Landline: 603-429-0220           Mobile: 603-320-5438
        It's not the years, it's the mileage.