Tape drive back up problems

[yes comps]

I was recently having problems with my tape drive not doing backups and HP quickly sent me out a brand new drive got it all plumbed in fine and even bought some new tapes so started from fresh reinstall the DPE software and updated to the latest version and also did the same with the updates on the windows 2003 server.

Initially we started doing none schedulded backups and it was all working fine and would over write the same tape no problem, then i resetup my schedule and everything seemed ok till it came to use the first tape in the rotation again, i checked all the settings for the rotation formatting and double checked compression was off all seems to be set up ok but will not make a backup. I also checked all the services needed are running and and even done the removable storage service trick of starting it stopping it disabling it.

Have once again taken it off the schedule have changed the usb cable for a new one and now it wont even run a none schedulded backup. The HP LLT software says that the drive is all ok and all the test pass, but this still fails to do a backup even with a new tape in the drive. Also tried the tape drive on a USB 2.0 card to eliminate there being an issue with the onboard usb. The errors im getting range from:
Error 4040 Hardware error
Error 1040 No devices specified or all devices are offline

Now obviously the above suggests a problem with hardware or the power on the usb but all the hardware bar the server itself is new and all the power settings on usb and everything is setup correctly.

Any help with this issue would be great

regards

adam

[Dennis Pillow]

ADAM,

I have almost the same issue. Have you gotten any info on yours yet? Please let me know if you have any info.

Thanks,
Dennis Pillow

[thomasr]

From your initial description of the problem, it sounded like perhaps it's that the backup application has reserved that tape for the first job (which is no longer active)... can you check your settings to either enable "append", or, recycle that tape so it doesn't think it was used by the old job (recycle can include format, or removing the tape from the media pool)? And possibly, add a new tape to the pool in place of the one that won't accept writes, so that you have a new one in the rotation in place of the non-working one?