thx for your site, request admittance to the club.
a friend asked me to have a look at his faulty backup system today.
yeah, you guessed it.
luckily, sony provides no help, so that didn't complicate matters further.
it was clearly an internal hardware issue, since the drive was unable to load a tape -period- even when unplugged.
I took a look inside to see whether it was a simple problem & wow: looks like a highschool scienceproject in there.
a cable feeding directly across the spool obviously got caught: i found it half way outside the socket, still scraping on the wheel whenever it turned.
Though i have not determined the actual cause of the malfunction, i think the scenario speaks for itself.
your site has prevented me from looking for (inexistant) fixes or even suggesting to buy head cleaning tapes
(another $50 a pop - sony must be out of their minds.)
thanks to your site, I only wasted only 3 hours instead of days.
maybe we should all spam sony by sending in our defunct equipment on the same day.