topic Re: Did my tape drive go bad again? in Operating System - HP-UX

Did my tape drive go bad again?

Haitham Hamad — Wed, 06 Feb 2002 16:50:44 GMT

I was not able to eject my tape this morning. It is an internal tape on a D-370. The mt offl command returned
/dev/rmt/0mnb: No such device or address
I can ioscan -funC tape and it shows it as claimed. I can not list the contents of the tape via sam (cannot find /dev/rmt/om) and my last night backup failed with rc=2. I can see my device files under /dev/rmt. Any ideas what is wrong?

Re: Did my tape drive go bad again?

A. Clay Stephenson — Wed, 06 Feb 2002 16:58:11 GMT

Typically, when the ioscan can't communicate at all with a device, you see 'NO_HW'. Because it is an internal drive, your only option is to shutdown and cold-boot your server. If this is your second failure, I would look very carefully at cabling and termination. Have you noticed any problems with the CD-ROM?

Re: Did my tape drive go bad again?

Kelli Ward — Wed, 06 Feb 2002 16:59:22 GMT

You might check your process status for any hung tape processes. If there are any, you probably won't be able to eject.
ps -ef | more
Good Luck,
Kel

Re: Did my tape drive go bad again?

Steven Sim Kok Leong — Wed, 06 Feb 2002 17:06:37 GMT

Hi,

What does the following command show?

# lssf /dev/rmt/0mnb

Try to re-install any missing device files (if any):

# insf -e

Hope this helps. Regards.

Steven Sim Kok Leong

Re: Did my tape drive go bad again?

Sanjay_6 — Wed, 06 Feb 2002 17:16:09 GMT

Hi,

you can reboot the system and see if the drive works after that. Otherwise you may have to replace the drive.

Hope this helps.

Regds

Re: Did my tape drive go bad again?

Haitham Hamad — Wed, 06 Feb 2002 17:19:47 GMT

My CDROM was working an hour ago but now it is not. The lssf is showing
stape card instance 1 SCSI target 0 SCSI LUN 0 berkeley no rewind best density a
vailable at address 8/16/5.0.0 /dev/rmt/0mnb

Re: Did my tape drive go bad again?

harry d brown jr — Wed, 06 Feb 2002 17:20:18 GMT

Haitham,

You will have, as already mentioned, shut the system down, but I would also follow that with a power off for 30 sec's, then power on for a boot. That's one of the reason's I dispise internal tape drives and cdrom's. One reason most of our systems (400+) have external tape drives.

live free or die
harry

Re: Did my tape drive go bad again?

A. Clay Stephenson — Wed, 06 Feb 2002 17:30:02 GMT

Hi:

Sine the tape and Cd share a common bus. It is now time to look very carefully at cabling and termination. It is also possible that the built-in controller is bad.

Re: Did my tape drive go bad again?

Haitham Hamad — Wed, 06 Feb 2002 17:33:10 GMT

Thanks everyone for your responses. I contacted HP and a CE is coming to look at it.

Re: Did my tape drive go bad again?

Thi Vu — Wed, 06 Feb 2002 19:03:42 GMT

Hamad,

Can you please let us know the result of what HP found and what they do to fix this problem? I had this same problem off and on (Friday it worked, Saturday and Sunday it did not and Monday and Tuesday it worked and today - Wednesday it did not) with one of the tape drive. I think I'm starting to imagine the problem. Thank you

Re: Did my tape drive go bad again?

Haitham Hamad — Wed, 06 Feb 2002 23:37:20 GMT

SE changed the tape drive and everything is back to normal. Thanks everyone for your input.

Re: Did my tape drive go bad again?

Kenny Chau — Thu, 07 Feb 2002 02:43:02 GMT

Well, since you had fixed the tape drive, I can just give you some suggestion.
Maybe you can use ioscan without option "u" to re-scan again. As my experience shows that ioscan -funC tape will show the information store in the memory. Without option "u", it will re-scan the all the device again. So if your ioscan -funC tape result show the tape drive is CLAIMED, it maybe different if you use ioscan -fnC tape, the result maybe NO_HW. I had experience this before.

Hope this helps.
Kenny.

Re: Did my tape drive go bad again?

Haitham Hamad — Thu, 07 Feb 2002 15:56:00 GMT

Kenny, Thanks for the reminder.