D220 Tape back-up problem / jamming

[Justin Coughlan]

Hello, I have been having problems with our tape back-up for a couple of months. The back-up performs O.K., but when the tape tries to eject, it jams in the drive, ripping the tape. We have an internal HP C1533A drive (DDS2). The drive was swapped ot with a good HP C1593, but the have the same problem. I think the controller on the I/O boasrd is going bad. I have obtained an external C1533 tape drive, but i need to know how - (a) What type of connector/cable do I need for the external to the server? Centronics to what? And (b) how do I know which SCSI ID and path to use? I'm afraid this is all new to me, I'm having a crash-course in HP-UX and Servers

[Bill Hassell]

Although the connector looks like a low-density Centronics cable, it is a SCSI cable. You'll need to look for a single-ended SCSI connector on the back of the D220. Unfortunately, this is an old box and online docs concerning the hardware are quite limited. The partsurfer website shows the basic box but there are several I/O cards that may have been installed. Once the tape drive is connected, use the ioscan -fCtape command to scan the hardware and find the new tape drive. Then use insf -e to create the new device file for the tape. The new tape drive will have a new name, perhaps 2m or 3m depending on how your system was configured.