A customer of ours has an HP DAT-72 tape drive (an old model HP C7438A) and we are trying to create a cleaning regime, after recently having problems where several tapes all needed renewing at the same time in order for it to keep functioning. We have a brand new cleaning cartridge.
The customer has already invested in two types of backup software. Their HP DPE backup software tape-cleaning function is not working and we have abandoned trying to resolve that after trying all possible solutions. Their Acronis backup software has no tape-cleaning function.
HP do not seem to provide such software for free, so does anyone know of a public freeware software utility to clean this drive please - perhaps from an old HP Engineer's CD collection?
As rindi said be sure to mark each time it is used and dispose it when it is all used up.