Ultrium 230e monthly errors

[CA604659]

I have four Ultrium 230e tape drives attached to NetServers via an Adaptec 29160 SCSI card. The servers are running Windows NT 4.0 with SP6a and Backup Exec. Once a month, Event ID's 9, 11 and 15 are generated and the tape drive is not recognized by the system. I then have to shutdown the system, power the tape drive off and on and restart the servers in order for everything to work again. I have tried changing the drivers for the tape drives from the HP driver to the Veritas driver, but it makes no difference. Two of the Netservers are LC3's and one is an LC2000 and one is an LH6000. All the tape drives are isolated on the Adaptec SCSI controller (no other devices attached). Anyone else encounter a similar problem or have a solution?

[CA628575]

Do you know which firmware version your drives are using?

There was a bug in an early version of Ultrium firmware, where the drives would overrun a value every 20-odd days, and required power cycling. This has been fixed in later firmware (several months back).

You can use HP Library & Tape Tools to both find out which firmware revision you use, and also update it if required. It can be downloaded at http://www.hp.com/support/tapetools.

[CA604659]

I checked the firmware on the drives and was able to upgrade two of them to the latest version. However, the other two are version E0AD and I cannot upgrade the firmware. Do they need to upgraded to an interim version before upgrading to the latest version? I could only find version E22D under Ultrium software upgrades.
Thanks for the help!

[CA628575]

Are all your drives standalone, or are some library and some standalone drives?

Library and standalone drives use different firmware images (identified by different peronality). The 'D' at the end of the firmware identifies standalone drives, a 'V' would identify firmware images for HP tape libraries 2/20, 4/40, etc.

Just to clarify: did the upgrade from E0AD to E22D not work, or did you think this was the wrong firmware?

Can you summarize which drives you have, and from to which firmware you have upgraded (or intended to upgrade), and we can verify if these would be the right choices.

[CA604659]

Yes, all my drives are stand alone. I now have a total of 5 drives, the two newest drives I have been able to upgrade the firmware on. The older three, with E0AD, do not recognize the new firmware and I have been unable to upgrade. I don't know what firmware the two newer drives had, but I do know it was not E0AD.
I have an Exabyte drive that I have upgraded firmware on and I know if it's not at a certain revision, you cannot upgrade to the newest firmware. First you have to upgrade to an interim firmware update and then to the latest update. I was just wondering if the same was true with the Ultrium drives. Perhaps the E0AD firmware will not recognize E22D and there is another version that I need to upgrade to first.
I hope this makes sense.
Thanks again for your help!

[CA628575]

I did check into this, and could not find any bridge code requirements for LTO drives (bridge code meaning an interim firmware you have to go to first).

There are override mechanisms in LTT that can be used with a password to force some updates. But before I recommend that, I'd like to understand more about the drives with E0AD firmware. If you could use LTT to create a support ticket on one of these drives, and then e-mail it to ltt_team@hp.com, I can take a look and try to understand why it does not allow you to select the firmware file.

[CA864713]

If it helps anyone, I have pretty much the same setup and also those Event ID's. I get them almost once a week though.
I have a LH6000 with (2) adaptec 29160 cards, each with only (1) HP Ultrium 230e attached to it. I've replaced the SCSI cables with high quality 6 ft cables. I've updated the firmware to E22D on both drives, updated SCSI BIOS on both, installed latest drivers from adaptec for cards and from Veritas for the drives. 1 of the tape drives will occaisionally go offline and flash alternating upper 2 and lower 2 lights. Drive 1 happens a little more often, but both drives have this problem. I've disabled IRQ sharing and made sure nothing shares IRQ's with tape drives. Help!

[Steve W]

When the top pair of LEDs alternately flashes with the bottom pair of LEDs the drive has gone into "Diag light" mode. This mode is triggered when the internal firmware diagnostic has detected a firmware problem. It does not necessarily mean that there is a fault, but the firmware should be updated. Reset the drive by pushing the reset button using a bent paper clip inserted in the hole at the top right hand corner of the LED panel, and upgrade the firmware. Could also be caused by power glitches.

[CA864713]

Steve, thanks for the information. The thing is, I have the latest firmware on the tape drives (E22D), should I re-apply them? As far as the power, I have it plugged into a APC brand UPS system which I thought acted as a power conditioner of sorts.
In my web research it seems people that have similar errors with Ultrium drives ALL have HP LH6000's or similar, which leads me to believe it's some sort of conflict with the server hardware.