SureStore DLT 718 Autoloader Issue - Power outage - Now cant read tapes

[Gary Reynolds_2]

Last week our building suffered a power outage, however we had a battery backup that kept everything going...Because the battery was going to run out of power soon, I gracefully shut down all of the servers and tape devices. Once power was restored, I turned everything back on. Everything was fine except for this DLT device.

The mechanics all work fine. The device loads/unloads the tape without any errors..The problem is during the scan process in Data Protector. It takes the tape and loads it, but when it tries to read the label, it takes a very long time (almost 20-30 minutes) and instead of saying the scan failed, it just marks the tape as BLANK.

I have verified that it is not a bad tape. And I have also tried to re-format a tape with a new label. It ends up doing the same thing where it scans for a very long time and eventually times out without writing a new label to the tape...

My question is, for this autoloader is there some sort of other troubleshooting I can do with this device? I have done all of the diagnostics on the lcd menu of this thing and I am looking to you guys for any suggestions. Thanks!

[Marino Meloni_1]

Be sure your backup application is well configured, especialy the tape drive.
It looks like as the robotic is correctly responding, and is loading the cartridge when requested, but the tape is not managed correctly and it may be you need to uninstall and reconfigure it again.
If you suspect a problem with the drive itself, you can also run Library and tape tools, with a good tape in order to check it.

www.hp.com/go/tapetools

[Curtis Ballard]

I would recommend that you clean the drive and try again then run L&TT as Marino recommended.

If the drive can't calibrate properly it will take 15 minutes before it gives up. Your "20-30 minutes" statement sounds like the drive could be hitting that maximum timeout.