Requested a retention operation

[Carlos Branco]

I have DP5.1 in W2k/SP4. One of my tapes is warning me like this: Tape Alert [24]: The tape drive has requested a retention operation. What can i do to change this?

[Claudio Ruzza_1]

Which kind of tape drive do you have?

Try to diagnose Tape drive problems using LTT
www.hp.com/support/tapetools

Let us know

[Carlos Branco]

I have a SDX-500C AIT drive.
I had run LTT tapetools and didn't found any erros.

[Claudio Ruzza_1]

Following I put some question that may help you to best identify, diagnose and (hopefully) fix your problem.

-Does this retention request appear with several medium or with one specific piece of media?
-Are your tape drives disabled for Windows? (Windows Device Manager, expand "tape drives", click right on every tape drive and choose "disable" - if this was your condition, remember to edit your devices in data Protector and choose the new SCSI device path, readable with the command "devbra -dev")
-Is the Windows "Removable Storage" Service disabled? If not, disable it immediately!
-Is your drives' firmware aligned and updated at the latest release?
-Is your Data Protector environment properly patched?

Hope it helps
Claudio Ruzza

P.S. what kind of test did you do with LTT?

[Carlos Branco]

I'm very sorry but i had make a great mistake: OS is not W2k but NT 4.0/SP6a.
The tests were: Hardware Scan/Device Analysis-Connectivity Test-Media Analysis Test-Device Self Test, with Default Options. Almost all the daily backups return that error. It's firware is updated and DP patched.

[Claudio Ruzza_1]

Check if you have latest WinNT drivers, for the drive SDX-500 and for the SCSI card.

The LTT test you should run is the Device Performance test.
You find a button on the upper (big) buttons bar. It is the third button starting from Right. It reads "Dev perf"

Enter that menu will allow you to write quite big amount of data to a piece of media (up to 16 GB of data, with different block size and the possibility to run multiple cycles). I'm curious to see if whit this test your error will occour again. If not, you probably ran into a Data Protector issue.

let us know
Claudio