Tape drive path state is "Stale"

[Mohammad Sanaullah]

Dear All,
I have one ES40 Box running Tru64 V5.1B and have intenal DDS3 tape drive.
After backup is over tape is stucked into the tape drive. Its been the case we usually resolve by resetting the hardware/taking restart of the server earlier,
hwmgr show scsi -full command it shows tape drive path state is in stale state.

Related output is attached.
Please let me know whats the reason behind this and the solution.

Thanks in advance points later.

[Kapil Jha]

so after it got stuck u reset the hardware.
did u perform
#hwmgr scan scsi
and then checked.

I am not very sure but did you check if all process reated to tape has been complted from OS end.

Did you try to perfor,
delete scsi id of tape drive.
hwmgr -delete

and then hwmgr scan scsi.

hope this help.

BR,
Kapil

[DCBrown]

So the backup works, but the tape isn't ejected and the end state is a stale path?

Have you checked the binary errlog for tape events?

It sounds like damaged hardware that fails somewhere along the way and stops responding resulting in the stale path. Resetting the device probably has been reviving it enough to limp along for a while longer.