DAT24e will not write to tape

[Blake Sartin]

I have a DAT24e installed on our Dell PowerEdge server (running NT Server). It tests fine with TapeAssure (including a write test), but with Tape Tools it fails the write test. Tapeware will not write to it either.

Tape Tools will however locate the drive and connect to it properly. It just refuses to write to the tape. The tape drive asks to be cleaned after every failure of the write. I have tried the 5-6 times cleaning and this does not help either.

This drive was recently moved from an HP-UX machine to the Dell. When on the HP it worked, but only intermittently (read problems). The switches are set correctly as per the manual.

Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks.

[Rothery Harris]

Dear Blake,

The 'clean light' is usually brought on by an excessive error rate. It looks like your drive has some serious read/write problems. It looks like the problems were starting to arise on the HP-UX system and have just worsened on the Dell system. Contact the HP Customer Care centre for service.

Rothery