A question about cleaning an 8mm tape drive

[Dave Olson]

In <1991Apr29.060340.562 at leland.Stanford.EDU> dhinds at elaine18.Stanford.EDU (David Hinds) writes:

| Following the advice I saw on the net, I got a dry cleaning tape for
| our 8mm drive, but now I'm not sure how to actually use it.  The tape
| says that it should be played for 15 seconds but not rewound between
| uses.  But, it doesn't seem possible to eject an unrewound tape from
| the 8mm drive.  Does this mean I have to waste 99% of my cleaning tape?
| Also, what 'mt' command do I need to use to get the drive to just
| play the tape with the head engaged, but to not try to read any data?
| Should I do something like start an 'feom', then kill it after 15
| seconds, or does that scan the tape more quickly than a normal read?
| I thought of doing an 'erase', but I don't know if that engages the
| normal read/write head(s).  What brands of cleaning tapes do other
| people use?  The one I found is made by Sony.

The drive firmware is supposed to automagically recognize the cleaning
tape.  So you insert the tape, it loads it, 'plays' it for about 15 seconds,
and then ejects it.  The kernel driver and/or mt are never involved.
--

	Dave Olson

Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.