DAT 40 drive not recognized by Proliant ML

[Chris Wyld]

We have several ML350 and 570 machines with internal DAT 40 drives. All systems are running Windows 2000 or 2003 server and use "ntbackup" to backup data. Sometimes, the systems will stop recognizing the tape drive, even though it shows up in Device Manager and under removable devices in Storage Management. The drive accepts and ejects tapes but the tapes are not "seen" by the system or the backup software. The only way I've been able to recover from this issue is to power the system off and then back on. A reboot will not do anything. Any suggestions for fixing this without shutting down a server? It's very frustrating and counter-productive to have to shutdown servers just to get the backup working. It's also a very sporadic problem with no errors in the event log that point to any hardware issues.

[Steven Clementi]

Chris:

Is "sounds" like a hardware issue, but can't really tell. How old is the drive? Is it firmware updateable? Perhaps it just needs to be replaced?

If it happens often enough to be "annoying" then perhaps it is that time to upgrade or maybe even move to a centrailzed backup solution.


Steven

[Chris Wyld]

We are in the process of moving to a centralized backup solution, but in the mean time, we need to get good backups. It's not the same drive on the same server, it's different drives on different servers and it happens sporadically. I could swap out the drive, but I know I can get the same results by powering the system down and back up. Plus, I don't want to go through a week of troubleshooting with tech support before they tell me that everything's fine. I was hoping someone had seen this before and had a hardware fix or software patch or something...

[Satish M.S.]

Chris:
If I may suggest, why don't you install Library and Tape Tools (L&TT) and run a few tests to qualify to see whether the issue is following the drive or whether if it is something pertaining to a software patch that may be needed.

The HP Storage Works Library & Tape Tools can be downloaded from
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DriverDownload.jsp?pnameOID=406731&locale=en_US&taskId=135&prodSeriesId=406729&prodTypeId=12169

Kindly run a Read/Write test and the Drive Assessment Test. Kindly do post the results or create a L&TT ticker.

Thanks,

Satish

[Chris Wyld]

I have installed L&TT on several of our servers as a direct result of this type of problem. However, at this time the offending tape drive is now working following a shutdown and "cold boot" of the server.