no more data is on the tape Errors

[chuck7]

A rash of this message lately:

Storage device "SONY 1" reported an error on a request to seek to a logical media address.

Error reported:
No more data is on the tape.

^ ^ ^ ^ ^

Everything seems to write to the tape OK, the failure message comes up during the verify. I applied media fix 234341 but the error still occurs. Running BE 8.5/ WinNT 4.0 sp6.

Any words of wisdom or similar trouble?
CW

 

[mnbrooks]

I am currently experiencing the same problems in 8.5, I have also in the past experienced this problem with version 7.3, the answer to the 7.3 problem was to load the latest Veritas drivers for the tape device (although as this is such a spurious message that may not be the correct answer for everybodies 7.3 problems). Now back to 8.5, I have decide for myself a dual course of action: -

1. Load the latest device drivers.
2. If the above fails then update to the latest version number.

I hope this helps, I will probably be doing the above next weekend, will let everybody know how I got on.

 

[chuck7]

Thanks for the reply. I spoke to Veritas about this issue. They at first suspected timeouts on the SCSI bus to be the culprit, but then advised me to upgrade to BE 8.5 build 3571, as well as the latest drivers,(bnt85idrv29a_237727.exe - Device driver release 20010615 and Autoloader
release 29a for BENT v8.5 ONLY (Intel)

http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/237727.htm

)

Installing build 3571 seems to have helped (so far, about 3 days w/o the error).

Before installing build 3571, following the drive manufacturer's advice, I shut down the BE services and manually inserted a new cleaning tape into the drive, and let run and eject a few times. This improved the situation but did not cure it. I'll throw in the comments of the manufacturer, Cybernetics, for your perusal:

"Chuck,

the fact that 6 out of 7 worked would also lead me to believe it was a
software issue as well... the fact that the DLT drive always works and the
AIT drive fails could be explained by the drivers or the sensitivity of the
AIT drive over the DLT... the sensitivity I am thinking of is to noise/weak
scsi bus... one idea, in addition to checking for the latest drivers for
the scsi card, that comes to mind at this point would be to adjust the
transfer rate of the scsi card... if it is an Adaptec card you can do that
by entering the scsi utility with a "ctrl+A" during boot up... I would
recommend lowering the transfer rate for all IDs on the card down to
10mb/sec (I am assuming that the drive is alone on the scsi card). the
10mb/sec is still above the rated sustained transfer rate of the drive,
which is 6mb/sec, so it will not have any negative impact on the performance
of the drive but will reduce the risk of scsi timeouts due to data
overrun...(more data than the drive can handle being sent to it by the
host)... let me know what happens with the new drivers and upgrade of
Backup Exec..

as far as the cleaning tape thing... like I said when we talked
yesterday... I am not a big fan of using the software to do the cleaning...
I have seen where the software acted flaky when you have a slot allocated as
a cleaning slot and have a cleaning tape in the slot.... granted there are
many people out there that do it that way, I just don't trust the software
and I personally recommend doing it manually and not having a cleaning slot
at all... I have no idea why backup exec would think the cleaning tape was
anything but a cleaning tape..."
CW

 

[chuck7]

FYI:

The message came back.

Now Veritas and the manufacturer suspect the 29160 card, and have me testing the device w/ a 2944 card.

 

[robald]

Just so you know you're not alone, we get the same intermittent error, on a DLT drive, Build 3571, on a Windows 2000 server. Re-trying the job sometimes works but we don't have a permanent fix.

R.

 

[Guest_imported]

I just got the same error using Version 8.6 3808 and Windows 2000 server - Compaq ML370 Server and integrated SCSI interface - Sony AIT-2 400GB AutoLoader, TSL-A500C - Veritas Drivers. As often as not I've found these errors to be related to faulty media. Though, we've used a number of drives over several versions of the software on different hardware platforms and I've still found BackupExec to only be 90-95% reliable. It's very frustrating.

 

[chuck7]

Whew, the problem continues after all this time. The situation got worse when I intalled v8.6 and everything became VERY VERY slow. I still got the "no more data is on the tape" message during verification, as before.

Here is what I have done that has improved the situation:

Installed Veritas on a server w/ a fresh install of win2k server. The speeds are back up to normal, and after a week I have recieved the "no more data" error only once. Still not good enough, obviously, but better.

A note on Veritas technical support. The word useless comes to mind. They really really tried to blame the scsi bus for the error message- on a server which has been stable as hell for its lifetime, then they really really tried to blame my network, which has no problems, for the slowness which started immediately after installing 8.6. Also, they emailed the same suggestions and possible causes for the trouble again and again, apparently ignoring my replies that the suggestions do not work. To top it off, Veritas recommended testing my AIT2 drive with an Adaptec 2944 card, a high voltage differential card, which according to Cybernetics, the drive manufacturer, would have destroyed the drive, which requires a low voltage differential card, such as the 29160. Jeeze!

Thanks for you posts!
CW