SCSI Interface Description for Ultrium 460

[Steven Hirsch]

Where can I find the elusive volume 3 of the Ultrium 2 technical reference? Many thanks for any help!

[Rich P]

Hi Steven,

These documents are not usually distributed to the general public. Can you tell me why you require it? If you have a specific issue then I may be able to help.

Regards,

Rich Prout
Test Engineer
Hewlett Packard Ltd
Filton Road
Stoke Gifford
Bristol BS34 8QZ
richard.prout@hp.com

[Steven Hirsch]

I have a version of tar that generates a tape index for fast recovery of individual files. It's worked for over 15 years on just about any tape drive you can think of. However, on the Ultrium 2 I'm getting an illegal command sense error on every ioctl() call to retrieve the block location. There's clearly something different about its operation and without the SCSI command spec there's no way to fix things. As further information, the 'mt tell' command also returns an error (essentially the same thing, I believe). Is the drive incapable of reporting current block location and/or seeking directly to specific block?

(Just curious: Why is the command set such a secret? For over 20 years I've been able to get SCSI command docs for the asking.)

If it's truly not possible to obtain, can you give me some assistance in figuring out the correct command structure for this one operation? FWIW, basic read and write function is fine, so I don't have any basic interfacing issues.

[Rich P]

I am looking into getting you a copy of volume 3

[Rich P · Accepted solution]

I have the document, can you let me know your email address?

[Steven Hirsch]

I'm sending my e-mail address directly to your e-mail account for sanity and security.

Your help is appreciated and I have another question. This unit reports firmware version F59W/OEM20. When I run the firmware updater, it's trying to flash F62-something, but eventually fails with a non-informative error. Should I be able to update this unit? If so, what's the magic incantation?

[Rich P]

can you tell me the other numbers associated with your firmware? They should be displayed something like xxx.xxx and should be reported after F49W

[Rich P]

Sorry that should have been F59W

[Steven Hirsch]

When I run hp_ltt under Linux, all I get is:

F59W/OEM20

no other numbers appear. Is there a different way to read this?

[Curtis Ballard]

That drive is an HP tape library drive. No other numbers are published for the firmware in automation drives but for Rich's reference the HP internal firmware build number is 007.646.

The newest published firmware is F68W (009.554) and only FxxW firmware versions will download. L&TT creates a file called "EventLog.ltd" that should have additional information about the failure if you have download problems.