I can display the drive with IE. I am having problems with tapes being wiped out. They won't load. They just keep reading/loading/reading/loadin.etc... I think it may have sonething to do with the end of life of the tape. I was told their are bits set to tell you if it is end of life.
Imation rate the media at 7 years if you do a full tape write every week, and 30 years if once per month. Does the drive at some point give up trying to load the tape and post an FSC code? What about other cartridges/drives?
Yes the drive finally gets a 37d3 error. The tape will not load on any drive until I run "make data tape" from menu.I am starting to believe Veritas is wipeing them out. I am checking that now.
Are these new tapes? If Not, It's possible these tapes have had the MIR (media information region) created on a 9940A. Not sure if you can re-create the MIR using the front panel of the B drive. Once you "make data tape" you should be fine to use that tape. The command sets the format as 9940A or 9940B, whichever you are using to do the make data tape.
No , they are not new. We only have 9940B's . After I do a make data tape it will work again. On occasion the make data tape will not work which tells me the tale is bad. Some of these tapes are 7 years old and are used once a week. I am believing the tapes are going bad.
Thanks
Meg
Something else you may take note of is if the firmware was recently updated on the B-drives. If these tapes were originally written on by a lower firmware, that could be an issue also. Just a thought.
Well Problem solved. After a numerous amount of tape tracking the Engineers found a tape drive with the write lines on all the time. Replaced drive and so far so good.
Thanks for all the responses.
Megan
meg12345, I have been having the same problem (37D3 and other FSCs) for over a year with numerous 9940B's getting damaged. I am at the point where I am sending more tapes with drive dumps to StorageTek Support for analysis. The last time they could not come up with an answer. I have searched the web for similar situations and have finally found yours. Curious as to what "tape drive with the write lines on all the time" means. Any insight? We are unable to determine if this problem is media (age maybe) or drive. Most errors are on scratch mounts but also have tapes where successful writes are followed by failed mounts when appending to tape (get the tape format error). Frustrating! Thanks
If "Write lines on all the time" is what I think it means, then write current (for tracks in the write heads) is permanently on, even when the required operation is a read. Not the sort of problem you want to go undetected for too long if cartridges are getting wasted...
Yes, going by what our maint company says. Just to make sure the symptons were the same. we would do a load on a drive and the tape would go to locating then reading then locating then reading until it finally got a 37d3 error. we had several drives doing this. we finally did a wrt/rd test on every drive and found one that would fail all the time. after we did a lot to this drive we could not load the tape on any other drive until we did the make data tape. Of course they did not get a scope out and look at the write lins, they just assumed thats what it was. The drive was replaced and we have not seen the problem since. These drives at the latest micro level should all run wrt/rd test error free. If you have one that doesn't then it should be repaired. Good luck and let us know what happens.
Meg
I seem to remember that on an IBM mainframe platform at least (was it TMS?), you can query a cartridge volume to find out all kinds of statistics, one of which was the last drive to write to it. If three or four cartridges all point to the same drive address then that might take you straight to the offending hardware. Don't know if that kind of info is available on other platforms though.
Yes,That's a good idea. According to imation (spelling), the data is written in the mir area for the 9940. I will have to find out how to read mir data.
Meg
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