Ultrium 448 Tape Issue

[Donald N]

I am not sure if this posted for me I haven't seen it in the tape forums and I could have swore I posted it here so my apologies if it is a double post.

Kinda trying to figure this one out but I am baffled. Here is a quick info on my setup. I have 2 Ultrium 448 LTO tape drives in a 1U rack mounted unit. One is connected to our Exchange Server 2003 and the other to a Windows Server 2003 for business data backup and whatnot. I will call a tape on our Exchange server Exchange Tape and our other server Backup Tape. Tapes Monday-Thursday back-up changes and Friday does a full backup. So my tapes are Exchange Mon-Thurs, Friday1-3, Month 1-3 and I have a spare tape called Exchange Spare in case we get a bad tape. This is how it is for both tape devices. I am using BackupExec 10.0 currently for both servers.

Recently whenever I put a tape from the Exchange series of tapes into the Exchange tape drive unit, even my spare tape, I insert it and after a little while of making clicking noises it ejects the tape and the tape light flashes. If I insert a tape from my Backup series of tapes it works fine. I put an Exchange tape in the Backup designated tape drive and it ejects it and the tape light flashes. I can understand a single tape getting corrupted or faulting out but a whole set of 10 tapes and 1 Spare all doing this leads me to wonder. I did put a Backup designated tape into the Exchange tape drive and it loaded fine and then I put it back into Backup tape drive and it still loaded fine so I don't think the Exchange Drive unit is making any tape I put into it go bad.

Any ideas or suggestions?

[Marino Meloni_1]

I think the way to go is to use Library and Tape Tools, this tool allow you to collect data from the drive, and allow you to run tests.

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storageworks/ltt/index.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN


if you do not found the reason with the tests, create a support ticket witht the "bad tape" loaded if possible, or just ejected if this is done automaticaly, and attach it here, we can give a look