I had the same issue until today. I opened the top to look around at what was happening. It turns out, there is a little motor in the front section which moves the tape spindles out to accomodate the large format tapes. It had been a year or so since the last time we had a large format tape. The motor was 'frozen' for lack of better terms. I turned off the deck and used my fingure to move the motor a bit by rotating the shaft manually to see if was indeed frozen. It moved fine and the deck is back to normal. Good Luck.