Compaq DAT 12/24

[Klaus Schiffgens]

Hi there,
I have problems with a Compaq DAT 12/24 in a ProLiant 2500 with Netware 4.11 SP9 and Arcserve IT 6.6. Drive is attaches to a Compaq ultra wide SCSI controller and Arcserve loads fine finding controller and drive. But whenever the drive shall write to a tape (erase, format, backup whatever), I receive head sync errors or media errors or as someone here said "the drive makes sounds like dancing polka" ending up in "drive needs cleaning", processor utilization goes up to 80% with users losing connections. Press the eject button and processor utilization drops to a one digit value.
So we let the drive change by our hardware vendor: he checked it and returned it saying: everything is ok with the drive. But it still behaved the way mentioned above. So I took the drive, cable and adapter and put it into a PL800 with the same software and it works fine! Made every firmware upgrade for the PL2500 that's available, put the drive back into it and still can't wite to medias. Any suggestions? The drive's firmware is 4.40.

Thanks, Klaus