tape stuck in 8mm Exabyte
2007-12-25 10:23:00
> I cannot remove the tape cleaning cartridge from my Sun exabyte 8mm
> drive. The software says it is offline and unloaded.
> I have tried
> 1. Power recycling: doesn't do anything.
> 2. Holding the eject button and repeatedly power cylcig and ejecting - no luck
> 3. Yelling at it, but it wouldn't listen.
>
> This happened once before and Sun came to replace the drive. But this is
> the third drive in 6 months, so before I bug Sun again, HELP!
>
Many thanks to the following people, who responded like Hermes afoot:
Patrick L. Nolan <pln@egret1.Stanford.EDU>
Tim Evans <tkevans@eplrx7.es.dupont.com>
Gnuchev Fedor <qwe@ht.eimb.rssi.ru>
"AO" <cherub@lava.net>
Amanda Dahl <Amanda.Dahl@exchangebrk.BARRA.com>
SOLUTION SUMMARY
There were three different responses, which I will paraphrase:
1. Call Sun, because either you'll void your hardware service contract
by opening the box to solve the problem, or they'll need to replace it
anyway 'cause its broke'.
2. Open the case, find the little switch on the left side of the drive,
and toggle it. To be more precise, from Patrick above:
"On my old Exabyte 8200 there's an emergency eject lever on the side.
You have to unscrew the drive from its mounting plate and pull it
forward by a couple of inches. On the left side there's a recess
containing a plastic lever. Pushing the lever opens the door and
operates the ejection mechanism. "
3. Go to the Exabyte web site, where you can get precise instructions.
This site is URL http://www.exabyte.com
I did step 3 first. The instructions are great. Great diagrams showing
what to do, and clear instructions. Of course they said I needed a half
dozen tools I don't have, like special torque screw drivers and so on.
Since most people said I needed to shutdown the system to open the case
and make the repair, I decided rather than printing out the instructions
from the web site, to follow the responses from the list.
I opened the case and verified that there was a little plastic cog-like
switch, gave it a twirl with an opened paper clip (thanks, Amanda), plugged
the unit in and powered it up and POP, out came the tape!
So many thanks to all.
Stewart N. Weiss
Department of Computer Science
Hunter College of the City University of New York
695 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10021
(212) 772-5469
email: weiss@roz.hunter.cuny.edu
POSTSCRIPT:
By the way, I did call Sun to find out what to do, after step 1 and before
the paper clip maneuver, but they said I'd need to wait 8 hours to speak
to someone. I figured I'd have a hard time with my users trying to
tell them that even though their files were a paper clip away, I waited
8 hours for someone to tell me what to do.
Comments
Got something to say?
You must be logged in to post a comment.
