LTO 4 Drive Assessment Test - What does this failure mean?

[DiskBytes]

Hello. I've had the following message in a drive assessment test,.... "Write buffer command (Writing mech EEPROM) failed: Sense key 0x04, sense code 0x4400 (internal target failure) Error code: 0x4003 nv_DATA_LENGTH_INVALID (Data length exceed length) but I'm not sure what it means. I can't find anything in the manuals. Does anyone know at all? Thanks. Image attached of the message also. https://flic.kr/p/2qFrP7S

[sbhat09]

Hello @DiskBytes,

Can you please specify which model of the tape library it is?

Regards,
Srinivas Bhat

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Note: All of my comments are my own and are not any official representation of HPE.

[DiskBytes]

Hello @sbhat09  I beleive it's an Ultrium 1760 tape drive. LTO-4 SAS.

[Curtis_Ballard]

That is an unfortunate error.  I have some familiarity with that test from things I worked on many years ago.  The test has completed and the drive passed but after a test has been run there is a step where a record in written into drive memory to record that the test was run and the results of the test.  For some reason writing the results of the test into the drive memory failed.  This looks like a code bug in the test where it should have more error handling.  There are several reasons why the test results might not be able to be stored in the drive, almost none of them affect the drive's ability to read/write.

[DiskBytes · Accepted solution]

How very odd indeed - at first I thought it may be an issue with the drive being able to talk to the chip which is inside the cartridge...........I found another report from a few years ago reporting the drive good.....I noticed the header said HPE L&TT.......

.....I then noticed mine said HP L&TT, clutching at straws I thought I wonder if it has something to do with the software version, as this drive was moved from an Oracle server not long ago which was running a different version to what I'm running in the backup server it's in now.......which was HP L&TT 4.2. .

I've just put HPE L&TT 6.5 on and it ran the assessment with no errors at al. 

Now given what you've just said, it reminded me that when I looked at the health report stored in the drive, it was reporting the older tests and none of the ones I made today, until the new software version ran it, so the old version indeed couldn't talk to the firmware!

All sorted, thanks all for taking a look.

[Sunitha_Mod]

Hello @DiskBytes,

That's Awesome! 

We are glad to know the issue has been resolved and thank you for keeping us updated.