Did my tape drive go bad again?

[Haitham Hamad]

I was not able to eject my tape this morning. It is an internal tape on a D-370. The mt offl command returned
/dev/rmt/0mnb: No such device or address
I can ioscan -funC tape and it shows it as claimed. I can not list the contents of the tape via sam (cannot find /dev/rmt/om) and my last night backup failed with rc=2. I can see my device files under /dev/rmt. Any ideas what is wrong?

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Typically, when the ioscan can't communicate at all with a device, you see 'NO_HW'. Because it is an internal drive, your only option is to shutdown and cold-boot your server. If this is your second failure, I would look very carefully at cabling and termination. Have you noticed any problems with the CD-ROM?

[Kelli Ward]

You might check your process status for any hung tape processes. If there are any, you probably won't be able to eject.
ps -ef | more
Good Luck,
Kel

[Steven Sim Kok Leong]

Hi,

What does the following command show?

# lssf /dev/rmt/0mnb

Try to re-install any missing device files (if any):

# insf -e

Hope this helps. Regards.

Steven Sim Kok Leong

[Sanjay_6]

Hi,

you can reboot the system and see if the drive works after that. Otherwise you may have to replace the drive.

Hope this helps.

Regds

[Haitham Hamad]

My CDROM was working an hour ago but now it is not. The lssf is showing
stape card instance 1 SCSI target 0 SCSI LUN 0 berkeley no rewind best density a
vailable at address 8/16/5.0.0 /dev/rmt/0mnb

[harry d brown jr]

Haitham,

You will have, as already mentioned, shut the system down, but I would also follow that with a power off for 30 sec's, then power on for a boot. That's one of the reason's I dispise internal tape drives and cdrom's. One reason most of our systems (400+) have external tape drives.

live free or die
harry

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi:

Sine the tape and Cd share a common bus. It is now time to look very carefully at cabling and termination. It is also possible that the built-in controller is bad.

[Haitham Hamad]

Thanks everyone for your responses. I contacted HP and a CE is coming to look at it.

[Thi Vu]

Hamad,

Can you please let us know the result of what HP found and what they do to fix this problem? I had this same problem off and on (Friday it worked, Saturday and Sunday it did not and Monday and Tuesday it worked and today - Wednesday it did not) with one of the tape drive. I think I'm starting to imagine the problem. Thank you

[Haitham Hamad]

SE changed the tape drive and everything is back to normal. Thanks everyone for your input.

[Kenny Chau]

Well, since you had fixed the tape drive, I can just give you some suggestion.
Maybe you can use ioscan without option "u" to re-scan again. As my experience shows that ioscan -funC tape will show the information store in the memory. Without option "u", it will re-scan the all the device again. So if your ioscan -funC tape result show the tape drive is CLAIMED, it maybe different if you use ioscan -fnC tape, the result maybe NO_HW. I had experience this before.

Hope this helps.
Kenny.

[Haitham Hamad]

Kenny, Thanks for the reminder.