HP Dat72 (C7438A) tears the reel of the tape cartrdige

[Mark Basco]

We bought new cartridges for our HP DAT72 internal tape drive for our backup. We used the tape using the Symantec Backup. Few minutes after inserting the tape in the drive, the drive ejects the tape and we noticed that the reel was torn apart.

In Event Viewers, we get the following errors:

1. The job failed with the following error: A hardware error occurred. (EventID: 34113)

2. The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error. (EventID: 57665)

3. Adamm Mover Error: Read Failure!
Error = ERROR_IO_DEVICE
Drive = "HP 1"
{438E66D0-6440-4C71-9912-E1CC918E2607}
Media = "4MM000028"
{2E0DB93E-0853-4ED2-A3D1-463576C55C08}
Read Mode: SingleBlock(0), ScsiPass(0)
Write Mode: SingleBlock(1), ScsiPass(1)
(EventID: 33152)

Anyone out there who already encountered the same? Is this a tape drive error? SCSI? Any help is much appreciated.

[thomasr]

This is clearly a problem. I don't know if it's a problem with the particular tape, or with your drive.

What brand are the tape cartridges you are using? You said they are new -- is it possible that it's a bad run of tape cartridges? Can you call the manufacturer and inquire as to whether this is a known problem with a particular set of a production run before continuing?

Ideally for finding out where the problem was, I would want to take some of these new tapes and test them in a different drive first. A couple of read/write cycles would give you a good idea if it is a problem with the media or not.

Once the media had passed that test, I'd put one in the drive and run some tests with HP's free Library and Tape Tools utility to assess the tape and the drive. Once those tests are complete, you can tell us the results, and you should have a good idea if the drive is starting to go bad, or if it was just a fluke occurrence (maybe a flaw in the tape cartridge internals or the tape media).

In any case -- I would NOT put any tapes previously written tapes with potentially critical data in until after I'd done the investigation above.