DAT24 drive intermittent 'write protected tape' problem

[Maurice Reed]

I have an external DAT24 tape drive which has been out of use for a while as a DAT40 was installed in its place. I now need to use the DAT24 on another server and having installed it and tested all ok I have found that intermittently it mis-identifies the tape as being write protected even though the tape isn't. This is annoying as the backup job is set to run overnight and I don't find that is's failed until I come in in the morning. Is there anything I can do to try and fix this problem myself? I have updated the firmware to the latest version but it looks like it's a hardware problem in the detector.

[Michael Tully]

Hi Maurice,

It certainly looks like hardware problem,
with the tape header. The only thing I
can suggest for you is to try and clean
the drive a few times to see if you can
get it too work. If it is under a support
contract get it replaced.

Cheers
~Michael~

[Marino Meloni_1]

hi
this error message may be due to a bad cartridge also, you can perform a read/write test or a validation media test on this media with LTT to understand if the tape is the root cause
bye
marino

[Maurice Reed]

Ok thanks. The tapes in use are not brand new but are in OK condition. I could understand a dodgy tape causing read/write fails but not 'write protect' errors. I feel it must be the part of the mechanism that detects whether the 'write' tab is over or not.

Anyway, I have gone through the entire set of tapes to be used and labelled them and inventoried them in BackupExec and will see what happens then.

[Robert Bean]

That error is also a good one to alert you to a firmware update. Use L&TT and make sure you have the latest version of firmware for the drive. Also you can run media validation tests on the media using L&TT. The latest version of L&TT is SR4, if you do not have L&TT you can get it at:

http://www.hp.com/support/tapetools

[Maurice Reed]

Again thanks for that. I did download and install the updated firmware when I installed the drive on to the server. I am going to monitor the performance of the tape-drive over the next few weeks and will decide what to do then.

Cheers