problems with seagate dds drive

I am running nt40 on a dell poweredge 2400 server. I have a seagate std2401LW 20/40GB Dat drive, that has been give me problems.. It started where when I was going to back something up the drive would just say loading and nothing would happen. Now when I put a tape in it will pop out in about 40 seconds. If I go into NT backup it will say tape drive detected and drive loaded but tape device is not responding. Now if I go into control panel, tape devices, drivers tab it says 4mm dat drive (not started).
Any help on troubleshooting? Everything worked fine and then backup jobs started to gradually fail up until this point. I would clean the tape once every two weeks or so…