Cleaning cartridge
A specially labeled IBM® LTO Ultrium Cleaning Cartridge is used to clean the drive head.
The drive itself determines when a head must be cleaned. It alerts you when the
single-character display (SCD) flashes a
. To clean the head manually, insert a cleaning cartridge into the tape
load compartment. The drive completes the cleaning automatically. When the cleaning is finished, the
drive ejects the cartridge, and the SCD is blank.

Note: The drive automatically
ejects an expired cleaning cartridge without running the cleaning process.
Replace the expired cleaning cartridge with a new cleaning cartridge and insert it into the
drive.
The IBM cleaning cartridges are valid for 50 uses. The cartridge's LTO-CM chip tracks the number of times that the cartridge is used.
Important: After 50 uses, the cleaning cartridge
expires. It is no longer usable, and must be replaced