HP35480A strangeness

[Duncan Greenwood]

I picked up this internal DDS drive for free recently and it works fine with W2K Backup and LTT. However, whenever I try to use it with DP5.0 (backup/scan/format) it complains it needs a cleaning tape.

It's marked on the front as SureStore Tape 5000 and I didn't think it supported TapeAlert.

Do I need to update the DP scsitab ?

Also LTT doesn't have any updated firmware for it.

I've attached the LTT ticket.

tia

D
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[Eugeny Brychkov]

Duncan,
1. LTT will not be able to show and download firmware if HP ftp site is unreachable. Latest for HP35480A is 'T603';
2. I guess your PC has Tekram SCSI controller installed. Try generic SE adaptec 2940 (UW) adapter with latest drivers loaded;
3. this behavior could be because backup utility is sensing drive/media errors when backing up data. Causes can be hardware issue (bad cable, no terminator etc) or software issue (bad driver, incorrect settings etc). As soon as LTT support ticket does not show any drive errors, I would check cable and termination first and then upgraded drivers or changed to well known good SCSI HBA
Eugeny

[Duncan Greenwood]

Thks,

I'll try a different HBA & cable when I can.

I downloaded the latest T603 f/w in LTT but now it say "wrong personality" in the list of available f/w files on my machine. I checked the DIP switches on the drive and they are set correctly to 11011111.

I'm using the latest hpdat.sys v1.05.01 driver.

Any thoughts ?

D
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[Steve W]

The SS 5000 (Tardis) is too old for L&TT to support. It was designed before TapeAlert, so I don't know where DP5.0 is getting the clean request from (unless the cleaning light is flashing, but you would have mentioned that) There is a second generation HP35480 (TitusDC) that does indeed take "Txxx" firmware, and AFAIK is supported by L&TT, but that is a much newer design. Did you try a cleaning tape?