> My Recollection is that these drives have 
> really crummy heads and they wear out very
> easily.  This could be it -or- are you using
> the same tape on all four drives?
> 
> My $0.02 (soon to be DM 0,04)
> 
> 
> Andy
> 
> > 1) I am beginning to have read problems on my TK50 drives 
> > (all four of them).

It is not the tapes, since I can read install tapes much of the
time.  The scsi TK50's usually read about 50% of the time.  The
tmscp TK50's are now reading only about 25% of the time or less.
I am using many different tapes.  I am not able to write tapes
hardly at all on any of them.

I am wondering if it might be a track alignment and if I can
fully erase (bulk erase maybe?) the tapes somehow for a fresh
run.  I don't see any driver driven way to erase the TK50 tapes?
mt, both in Ultrix and NetBSD has no erase capability.   I tried
writing zeros and ones and then random, but that did not help
much.  I sense I really need a clean erase on these old tapes.

What, in particular in the mechanism needs to be looked at for
cleaning other than the head (idiot lights maybe?)?

What, in particular wears out in the mechanisms?

Thanks

Bob