DAT 24 Tape Drives

[Ed Buscall]

I have two intermittent (but frequent) problems. First my DAT drive will often eject the DDS3 cartridge on morning power up. This can usually be fixed by just re-inserting the cartridge but sometimes I have to power down (with the cartridge out), power back up and then insert the cartridge.

Much more frequent and more annoying is when the scheduled backup starts, the drive say this tape media is "write protected" (which it isn't) and ejects the tape. Later I find I did not get the scheduled backup.

I have asked HP the cause and solution to these problems several times but have never got a resolution.

Can anyone help.

Using BackUpMyPC v.6.0 under Win XP Pro.

Thanks.

[Lewis Finch]

If you download the Library and Tape Tools diagnostic and then attach a support ticket we can have a look and see what might happening.It may be you are not cleaning it often enough. The support ticket will tell us if that is the case.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DriverDownload.jsp?pnameOID=406731&locale=en_US&taskId=135&prodSeriesId=406729&prodTypeId=12169

[Ed Buscall]

I do a tape clean every sunday evening.

At 1 am Monday I put in a tape and do a full backup, about 7Gb.

Monday morning I remove that tape and put in another. The scheduler then does a differential backup every evening, about 700Mb.

At end of week start cycle again.

Using HP DDS 3 tape cleaner and tapes.

Downloaded files. Ran them and they did not complete. If I run them again it tells me that and says it will fix it, then to re-run L&tt exe. Every time I try I get same message.

So I'm stumped! Went searching HP but could not find anything to tell me what to do.

The support program said it installed ok.

What now?

Regards

Ed

[CLin_1]

Remember to stop the every backup services. Start up, stop and then set it as disabled to Removable Storage service.

Then you can run L&TT.
Run drive assessment test.

[CLin_1]

Much more frequent and more annoying is when the scheduled backup starts, the drive say this tape media is "write protected"

Try run L&TT read/write test with this "write protected", if it pass it means is your software configuration issue. :)

[Ed Buscall]

I managed to get L&TT installed. Got confusing results.

At one point it ejected the tape and said it was "write protected", which it wasn't of course. Couldn't proceed without putting tape back in.

Consistently now, the drive ejects the inserted tape on Power Up in the morning (I power down every night).

I generated a support ticket but don't know what e-mail address to send it to?

It does show three warnings, which also came up several times when testing earlier today.

1. You appear to have used tapes not designed for this drive.
2. Please use tapes that are compatible with your product.
3. Unsupported tapes have been inserted 202 times.

I was having trouble with a couple of tapes (HP) and though they have supplied replacements in the past, the cost of shipping them to Toronto is more than the cost of a new tape at my local dealer. I note that I now no longer have any HP tapes and have 4 sony tapes and the 2 new tapes are Maxell (one of which just gave the errors above when I reran L&TT. I really don't understand the error message because these are all DDS3 tapes and work fine (except for the problems originally raised). Is it giving these messages because I am not using HP media? (which my dealer no longer stocks!)

I have saved the support ticket and will send it to someone if they wish and if they tell me how.

Many thanks for the help today from everyone.

Ed

At one point it told me the drive internal error log was full and I had to "flash the firmware" to clear it. I did this, but, of course, the drive is still at L411, which is the latest version.