9-track tapes have reflective stickers placed on the non-data side from the beginning of the tape and from the end of the tape to facilitate signaling the hardware to prevent the tape from unwinding from the hubs. These reflective stickers establish the beginning-of-tape (BOT) and end-of-tape (EOT) marks. of leader and trailer tape is sufficiently long to allow the tape to go down and up the air columns and wrap around the hub a few times. The extra in the trailer is to allow the operating system space to write a few blocks of data after the EOT mark to finalize the tape data segment in a multi-volume dataset. Operators commonly clip off a few inches of leader tape when it becomes frayed. If the leading reflective strip becomes detached from the tape it becomes difficult to read the data, since the BOT point of the dataset is no longer easily located and BOT orientation is nearly impossible.