tape drive problem

[Bruce Marshall]

On Saturday 31 May 2008, Vu Pham wrote:
> My tape drive suddenly reports the following error when I write to it.
>
> tar: /dev/st0: Cannot open: Read-only file system
>
> What can cause this ? I used a tape cleaner tape to clean it but it does
> not fix. And the "dirty" LED is not on.
>
> It is a DLT1 tape drive.
>
> Any idea ?

If it's anything like the DDS drives I used to use,  it takes a 'cleaning 
tape' to turn the light off.   There were special tapes made for the cleaning 
run and they were only good for a specified number of cleans.

The drive recognized the cleaning tapes and would go into a cleaning process 
with them.  Took about 30 seconds.