All LTO4 Tapes Bad on HP 1/8 G2 with Ultrium 4-SCSI

[BackupAdminGuy]

Hello !

We have an HP 1/8 G2 Autoloader with an Ultrium 4-SCSI tape drive.

We use Backup Exec 10d for Windows Servers on a Win2003 SP2 for backups.

In the past we have used both LTO3 (7973A) and LTO4 (7974A) cartridges with success. Recently all the LTO4 cartridges fail in various ways. LTO3 cartridges remain fine. We have about 15 bad LTO4 cartridges at the moment.

The symptoms below are all happening to LTO4 cartridges that have data on them from previous successful backups.

- Some get CRC errors during a job

- Some are marked bad upon load.

- Some are marked blank upon load.

- All cartridges end up failing during a short or long erase, or if the erase works they end up failing with read errors or crc errors during a backup job.

The HP 1/8 G2 firmware has been updated to 3.80

The HP Ultrium 4-SCSI tape drive firmware has been updated to W61W/MSL G3

The Windows 2003 Installation is fully up to date.

The Backup Exec 10d (5629) is up to date with SP4 installed.

Both the 1/8 G2 Autoloader and the Ultrium 4-SCSI tape drive pass their self tests with HP LTT. The 1/8 G2 passes the Device Analysis test, but the Ultrium 4 passes with some warnings, which are:

(FYI Slot 1: Cleaning cartridge, Slots 2-8: LTO4 cartridges)

- Rule 5.0: Unrecoverable read error on tape in slot 7

- Rule 8.12: one or more cartridges has missing/unreadable barcode. (We do not use barcodes)

Does anyone have any suggestions about why we are experiencing this problem and what we can do to solve it?

Thank you.

[BackupAdminGuy]

The Ultrium tape drive has stopped reading all LTO3 and LTO4 tapes now which means the original problem was the hardware itself.