Ultrium 920 New Tape problem

[Antal_Pal]

Hi

I'm using on a daily basis an external Ultrium 920 SCSI LTO-3 drive. So far I never had any problems with it. Couple of days ago I received a new batch of C7973A tapes.  I noticed that the package changed but everything else looks the same (same model number, capacity, etc.).  I was in the middle of a backup when I had to insert a new tape and since I run out of the old one I had to use a new one. After a couple of minutes spent to recognize the media It give me an error and the clean led started to blink. I never saw so far the clean led blinking even I'm using the drive for a last 2 years. I inserted the cleaner cartridge and the blinking stopped but I'm not able to backup anything on the new batch of tapes, I tried already 4 different tapes but the symptoms are the same. The drive should be OK because I can restore my old backups.

I installed the latest drivers, I tried to upgrade the firmware but the unit had the latest one, so everything should be fine, but is not.

This is the error message what I receive: "Error: The device reported an error on a request to mount the media.
Error reported: Unknown error.
There may be a hardware or media problem."

What can I do? Should I order different tapes like different manufacturer?

[thomasr]

Ugh -- that doesn't sound like fun.

The first thing I'd do is download HP's free Library and Tape Tools from http://www.hp.com/support/tapetools and run a drive test.   It should give you more information.    If that fails, then you can generate a support ticket and post it here.

Two years sounds like a long time to go without a cleaning, and it's possible some particles just happen to be stuck tight to the head, and another pass or two of the cleaning tape will fix it... but I'd run the diagnostics above before trying that.

[Antal_Pal]

Funny that I found some spare space on one of my old tapes (2 month old) and did a test backup and surprise it worked perfectly on it. I can't run a test because I don't have a spare empty tape and as soon as I insert a new tape it gives an error. I sent back these tapes and try to find some other brand.. but I'm totally confused how this is happening..

Attached is the report from Tapetools with the new tape inserted.

[thomasr]

HP's branded tape media is supposed to have a lifetime warranty -- I'd sure hope you would return it to HP and we'd do some sort of analysis on it to find out what happened... because what you're seeing is not something we ever want a customer to see.

[thomasr]

OK, some other things I thought of that might be germane --

1) I've seen customers on rare occasions where a tape head was going bad (alignment issue?), and it could continue to write to tapes it had already written, but could not write to new tapes, and could neither read nor write tapes written in a 'good' drive.   So it's possible you have that problem; certainly if you get some other new media and can't write to it, I'd think this is much more likely.

2) I've sent a note to a contact in the tape media organization to find out how they'd like incidents like this to be handled.   I got an out-of-office response (back Wednesday) but will see if I can find someone else sooner to get you a response.   

3) I have a very busy morning and don't have time to look through your support ticket... will as soon as I can (this afternoon or tomorrow) and let you know what I see.  Or maybe one of the other forum posters has a chance to take a look.

Thank you for buying HP tape drives and media.   We at HP want to get this issue fixed for you.

[Antal_Pal]

Thank you for spending time on my issue.

2 days ago when I started the backup I was using a new tape and everything worked just fine till the moment I inserted the new tape from the new batch...

I'm not sure how accurate is the report because as I mentioned I have problem already mounting the tape... but anyway let see.

[Curtis Ballard]

Strange - the first post says the device reported an error on a request to mount the media so I expected to find something in the load process and maybe a flaw in the tapes you received. Our media team would be very interested in that. The ticket you posted however didn't show any load issues and instead showed that it wasn't able to write to the new tape. That doesn't make any sense to me. None of the load history in the logs showed enough tape use for me to be able to lean anything about the read/write quality on your previous tapes.

If there is something wrong with the media and it can't be written to that is also very much of interest to the media team and as Thomas says if you returned it then it should make it back to them for FA.

[Antal_Pal]

I managed to exchange my new tapes with a friend who had 2 boxes of old ones(brand new, never used tapes). I managed to run the test and the report is attached. These tapes are totally fine my device is able to mount, write and read on them, so I resumed my archiving session.

[Antal_Pal]

It look like my friend made a bad deal, he just called to tell me that his new SAS LTO drive having the same symptoms with the tapes as I did. So 100% that the tapes are the problem and he is going to give back to our local dealer.

[thomasr]

May I ask that you hold off on giving those back to the dealer for just a bit -- I'm working with the HP Media team to try to figure out what the process is for us to get those tapes in for analysis (and to replace them with good tapes for you!).