HP StorageWorks Ultrium 960 stand alone drive

[Ava Tomson]

I am on my third replacment tape drive. These single tape drives are ejecting tapes. The drive works for about 2 to 3 weeks and then it will start ejecting the tapes. Is anyone else having this issue? Any ideas? Our firmware is up to date.

[Richard Bickers]

Hi Ava,

These drives usually go on forever so there's something up. My guess would be it's environmental.

Please check the drive is installed in a clean location a reasonable distance from printers, construction(!), main walkways, main air vents etc.

It's possible you've got contaminated tapes which are causing your replacement drives to fail. Can you try a new tape?

If you like you could attach a L&TT support ticket for the drive and we'll take a look see if there's anything amiss. Did you run the drive assessment test with a known good tape before replacing the drive? (HP support should ask you to do that).

To attach a ticket, install and run L&TT from www.hp.com/support/tapetools, select the drive, go into the support tab and extract the device data. Then save the ticket as a directory (it's two files), zip the two files up and attach the zip. I hope that's clear - we'll make it easier in future!

Richard (LTT team)

[Ava Tomson]

The drive is located in an airconditioned humidity controlled server room. There is very little dust and most of the tapes are brand new. Yesterday in desperation, we applied a service pack to the Veritas Software, ran OS updates on the server and rebooted. The tape unit took a tape and ran a sucessful backup last night. Cross your fingers for me. I know most of the hp tape units keep on ticking forever. I have a dlt that is 8 or 9 years old and we just retired.

[Richard Bickers]

The LTT support ticket can tell you how well your backups are going w.r.t. quality and performance from the point of view of the drive. If you run a back-up and then pull and attach a ticket I can take a look at it if you like.

Richard.

[Ava Tomson]

Here are the log files. I hope I have the correct files.

[Richard Bickers]

Hi Ava,

You could do with upgrading your version of LTT as yours is quite old now. Not so much info in the ticket. The latest one is on the web (link above). You'll need to unistall your old one first as it's a pre-4.0 version.

Anyway, having said that, there's still quite a bit of info in the ticket you sent me and I can see the drive is in great condition. These drives have tons of margin and yours is right at the top of it. Don't let HP support change this drive! If you still have an issue it's with another part of your system.

Fingers crossed.

[Jaclyn Rothe]

Rejecting media can be caused by a variety of issues and usually does not indicate a hardware failure.

Seeing as this unit has been replace numerous times we can assume it is not a drive problem.

A few other factors which cause the rejecting media symptom include but are not limited to; incorrect media, bad media, drity drive, software eject commands, scsi bus errors, corrupted drivers, communication issues, firmware issues, or damaged media.

A good way to determine if the issue is related to the server;
1) disconnect the drive from the server and powercycle the drive
2) insert a new unused media tape (which has the best chance of being a good tape)
3) most likely the drive will hold the tape

next things to check:
1) update drivers on the tape unit in device manger... avoid using generic drivers (HP or Microsfot) whenever possible and always follow the recommendations of the back up software regarding drivers (veritas makes their own)
2) ensure the drive is not connected to a raid card, Tape drives are not reliably compatible with rais controllers
3) ensure the device is isolated on it's own SCSI HBA bus
4) update the drivers on teh SCSI card
5) inspect all media for external damage, leader pin assembly (LPA), loose screws etc
6) does your software have an 'eject after back up' option? this might be, being reproduced by software and so the drive will continue to eject the media tape over and over
7) flashing firmware on drives is recommended when strange issues happen, even though there is no newer firmware available, flashing firmware does others things like clear the SCSI bus for errors which might be causing strange drive functions, and it also resets the drive to default calibration... so if firmware has been corrupted it will now be over written and the drive can commence as normal.
8) media tape can also be damaged in a way that is not visually detecable... losse tension int he tape can cause drives to reject media, also if the tapes are stored close to a magnetic of electrical source the data chip int eh tape might be erased and the tape does not understand how to use the media so it ejects it. (normally followed by a media attention light)
9) if other services are running on windos platforms like; Removable storage... this can cause communication issues as well. RSM is used for ntback up, if youa re not using this as your software this service should be stopped and disabled. Please note that SP1 is the minimum recommendation for Windos 2000 and 2003 to prevent other potential RSM issues.

Try these suggestions to diagnose the issue.

LTT is always recommended to determine if the drive has issues.
Download and uninstall previoous version of LTT.
LTT 4.1 is now available:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DriverDownload.jsp?pnameOID=406731&locale=en_US&taskId=135&prodSeriesId=406729&prodTypeId=12169

Run the drive assessment test ONLY once the above steps have all been followed. ALL services need to be stopped before using LTT or false test results can be present.