Lynn,

Have you tried running a cleaning tape through the drive? When the drive
really needs cleaning, there will be an LED stating this. If the drive does
not have a cleaning indication on the LEDs, then please try to find if
Veritas has any hotfixes for their software. Unfortunately I have had too
many instances of Veritas software claiming hardware related problems that
are suddenly 'fixed' by a software patch.

Not today but I will run a cleaning tape thru the drive. I do know
about the Veritas problem though. I want to upgrade to the 4.85
version now marketed by Stomp Software as Backup My PC
but they have a bug when writing more than 49 GB to a tape.

If all appears well, try Exabyte's vxaTool diagnostics software to see if
the drive writes and/or reads properly (Use a SCRATCH tape...). Last but not
least, make sure your SCSI bus is running in LVD mode. The drive can switch
to Single-Ended mode, but this is not a recommended mode and can cause
read/write difficulty.

One of the problems of the vxatool utility is that there is not a test
for the entire tape. Or do you know of way to test the entire tape ?
I did erase the entire tape last Friday using Vxatool before I used it.

BTW, I tried calling Exabyte here in the USA. I sat on hold for
30 minutes (on my long distance dollar) after my email to
bounced back. Not very professional.

Thanks,
Lynn