DEC TL894 on W2003 detects drives as stand-alone..

[Renaat Dumon]

Hi all,

I'm trying to use my good old TL894 on a Windows host for testing some backup softwares.

My TL894 is configured with four (4) TZ89 drives and is configured in the "two-wire SCSI configuration".

The HBA I'm using is a dual-port SymBIOS one (HVD) which Windows reports as LSI Logic 53C875/53C876 and it is correctly detecting both library and the four drives at boot-up and in Windows' device manager. The library is mentioned there as a 'Digital TL810 DLT library' with no exclamation marks or anything, it started correctly. I had to enable SCAM on the HBA before Windows could successfully "start" the Autoloader though..

Now when I check with LTT, it gives back an error message saying it found 5 devices (1 autloader and 4 drivers), but that it could not detect 1 or more drives in the Autoloader... Huh ?

See the attached screen shots...

I even tried some backup softwares and they also come back the same. They detect an autloader with no drives, and 4 stand-alone drives... this doesn't make sense!

I upgraded the firmware of those drives with LTT from V060 to V080 (latest) and that worked. However the drives are still coming up as stand-alone, i.e. LTT still says there are no drives in my library. Funny thing is that using LTT I can use the "Front Panel" functional to actually load tapes in my 4 drives...!

The firmware of the robotics is currently at 1.25 and I can't find any updates on that. Is there somebody that knows where I can find updates ?

This library and its drives worked not so long ago on an old DEC platform so I guess it's purely configuration :s


Kind regards,

Renaat

[rich pattison]

Hi

the recommended SCSI ID's for this model are:
Robot=SCSI ID 0
Drive 1=SCSI ID 2
Drive 2=SCSI ID 3
Drive 3=SCSI ID 4
Drive 4=SCSI ID 5

Also - the Robot *MUST* be the first device that is "seen" by the host server - so the SCSI bus connected to the robot (and drives 1&2), must come before the SCSI bus connected to drives 3&4.

Also - check that the RSM (removeable storage manager) service is stopped *AND* disabled from the computer manager window.

Can't find any info on firmware. I guess L&TT would have notified you if newer firmware was available ;^)

Rich

[Renaat Dumon]

Hi

I tried these default SCSI ID's but they do the same thing :)

I also confirm that the robot is the first device seen by the host. It's on hba 0 , and is the first device on the loop.

RSM is disabled on that server and is hence not running... I disabled all devices, and then tried to use LTT but to no avail..

I have noticed something new this morning (before the abovementioned changes - disabling devices in device manager)

See the attached screenshot.


I must say that that message :"Serial Number not reported by Library" got me thinking. I set up Commvault and did an exhaustive detection of library and drives. It proceeded with mounting/unmounting tapes in drives, detecting that the mount worked and that the tape was readable, after which it concluded the drive had to be in the library and added it to its configuration. It did so for every drive. So I got Commvault Galaxy working.

Still not sure why LTT isn't willing to notice that ... :)

[rich pattison]

The L&TT supported devices list doesn't show the TL894:

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/11591_div/11591_div.pdf

It seems like it has responded to an enquiry as a TL810 - which is a similar unit, but with TZ87 drives instead of TZ89's as in the TL895. I guess thats enough to mess up L&TT !.