Cleaning Light comes up when I insert tape. (drive is clean!)

[Daniel Simard]

I'm already almost sure of the answer but would like your thoughts.
We have a K Class HP-UX server running 11i.
Every day, we insert a DLT tape in our DLT 4000 tape drive. Because the DLT tape was previously written with ARCSERV, the cleaning light comes on.

There are two ways of "fixing" this. One would be to simply tar to the tape drive. (this make the cleaning light dissapear.) The other is to do a small fbackup to the tape drive. (the light also dissapears.)

My question? Are these little actions required in order to do a good backup to the tape drive? In other words, can I "ignore" the light and assume that our nightly fbackup job will run normally and thus remove the light all on it's own or will I have to run one of those jobs every day to make sure the light is off before the real backup runs ? Thanks!

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Hi
The cleaning light is controlled independant of the backup software and is triggered by a certain number of read/write failures on the drive by its own monitoring embedded software.

First try a new cleaning tape - if I remember correctly they are only good for 20 passes and if this fails then the drive heads are failing.

Log a support call and get it swapped out.

Paula

[John Payne_2 · Accepted solution]

I assume you are talking about different DLT tapes each night here. Does the light disappear at the start or the end of the fbackup? It may be that the tape tries to read the start of the front part of the tape... (I don't know. All CA software gets it's hooks into stuff one way or another...)

I guess if you get it every time you use a 'new' old Arcserve tape and you get the error, but on using any brand spankin' new tape or reuse one of the old Arcserve tapes you don't get the error, you are problibly ok. To be safe, I would tar something to each tape sometime soon when you don't have anything better to do. (Or better yet, if you have somebody else with nothing better to do.) Then you don't have to worry about it. If you get the cleaning light on a brand new tape, then start worrying about your drive...

Hope it helps

John

[John Bolene]

I had a bad tape that every time it was inserted it turned on the cleaning light.

The drive looks for a tape header to see how it was formatted and could be getting read errors trying to get this data.

I also ahd one drive that was extra dirty and required 4 passes with the cleaning tape to finally clear up any tape problems.

Keep in mind that a dirty head can make even brand new tapes dirty.