AS6.5, NT4, device manager "No media in drive"; tapetest.exe

[zophad]

Although I know a tape has been inserted, Device Manager reports "no media in drive" and job activity logs report "W3831 Unable to find any Cheyenne Media". The Drive is a Compaq 20/40 DLT and has been replaced for precisely this fault. Previous entries on this forum suggest a cold reboot, reseat of SCSI card and cabling. It's a long way to this server! Question. What does TAPETEST.EXE -rescan do? Does it reinitialise the card? And does it take a long time? I've been running it remotely via rcmd for at least an hour with no visible results.

Any ideas anybody?
hanks

 

[iowtech]

Have you tried formatting the tape?

From Quick Access, go into Device Manager, right click tape drive or tape under it and choose format.

Have you got the NT tape drivers installed? Arcserve requires no NT drivers for the tape drive to be installed. I've had h/w support guys replace tape drives, and take it upon themselves to install NT drivers at the same time! May be worth checking!

 

[zophad]

The problem in running Tapetest -rescan using Remote Command (rcmd) is that tapetest prompts for a SCSI ID and under Remote Command you will never see the prompt to reply to it which is why I was waiting an hour!
So the way to run the command remotely is via a scheduled batch file or preferably through some remote control programme like SMS so you can interact with tapetest's prompts. As to the -rescan option itself, it may provides a possible solution when the alternative is a complete cold reboot.