compdoc Posted February 13, 2006 Report Share Posted February 13, 2006 I'm getting this error performing a backup to a new Quantum DLT-V4 320gig tape drive: Device trouble: "1-Backup Set A", error -102 (trouble communicating) The first backup of 50 gigs of data is fine, but incremental backups are getting this error. It seems that Retrospect is timing out waiting for the drive to position to the end of the tape to begin the backup. To make matters worse, once this happens, Retrospect closes the tape and wants a new tape, even tho theres close to 300 gigs left to go on the tape. The drive came with a free version of Backup Exec which doesnt have this problem. But Backup Exec sucks... Any way to modify the timeout values? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted February 15, 2006 Report Share Posted February 15, 2006 Hi This is a communication problem to the drive. Make sure the windows drivers for the drive are disabled in device manager. Retrospect has its own drivers. Make sure Backup Exec is completely uninstalled. Any tape drivers left in the system could cause this problem. Make sure you have installed the latest version of your Retrospect version and the appropriate Retrospect update from the EMCinsignia.com updates site. What SCSI card are you using? Are there any other devices attached to the SCSI chain? Thanks Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
compdoc Posted February 16, 2006 Author Report Share Posted February 16, 2006 Yes, I can see its a communication problem. I removed all Backup exec software, and tried using only the windows drivers from Quantum, which allows the device manager to install the drive in the list. But it still has the error. Then I removed even the Quantum drivers, so that the drive shows as an unknown device in the device manager, but it has the same problem. In all cases, Retrospect can see the drive, and seeks the tape to begin the backup, but never sees the drive reach the blank portion of the tape. The drive just keeps seeking and seeking and seeking until the error -102 (trouble communicating) occurs. The backup does work if I erase the tape and start from scratch. I can backup any amount of data, and do multiple backups as long as I dont quit Retrospect. This is a SATA drive - not SCSI. And Backup Exec works fine with it. Quantum provides a test program called xtalk (DLT Sage) which performs read/write and communication tests on the drive. This takes about 30 minutes, and the drive passes all tests. Its the latest version of Retrospect 7.5. At first I thought it was a timeout problem, but its not. Retrospect isnt reading the drive. Its a problem with Retrospect, not the drive... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
compdoc Posted February 16, 2006 Author Report Share Posted February 16, 2006 I searched the Windows folder for files containing the word 'DLT' and found an .inf file, and one more .sys driver file, and deleted them. It might be working now... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
compdoc Posted February 18, 2006 Author Report Share Posted February 18, 2006 No, I was wrong. It still happens. Retrospect cant communicate properly with this drive. This is very disappointing. I'm going to have to switch to another backup program. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted February 20, 2006 Report Share Posted February 20, 2006 Hi So you are using a SATA-SCSI converter? Or is this a native SATA tape drive? Any details you could provide would be a big help. Thanks nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
compdoc Posted February 20, 2006 Author Report Share Posted February 20, 2006 Its a native SATA tape drive connected directly to an nForce4 socket 939 motherboard using standard cables. This motherboard comes with 4 SATA connectors, the first two of which are connected to the system's two 120 gig sata hard drives. All of which works perfectly. The system has a 500 watt PSU, and 1 gig dual channel DDR400 ram, and a64 3500+, running Windows XP Pro (32bit). It's not used as a server. To test just now, I erased the tape and backed up & compared 2 gigs of data (various sized files) with no errors. Its the SATA version of this drive: http://www.quantum.com/Products/TapeDrives/DLT/DLTV4/Index.aspx Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted February 21, 2006 Report Share Posted February 21, 2006 Thanks for the clarification. What version of the Nforce drivers do you have installed? What version of Retrospect are you using? If you are not using the RAID features of the SATA controler don't install the RAID drivers. That can cause other problems. I suspect an update of the nvidia drivers will help. Thanks Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
compdoc Posted February 22, 2006 Author Report Share Posted February 22, 2006 latest versions of retrospect (7.5), latest nvida nforce drivers (6.70). Except not their IDE drivers which I find to be unstable on most systems. Im not using IDE drives anyway... No raid or raid software installed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
compdoc Posted February 24, 2006 Author Report Share Posted February 24, 2006 Im a system builder, so I have lots of parts lying around. Tried different quality sata cables. Tried different sata ports on the mobo. Tried with and without the nVidia IDE drivers. Then got this idea - installed the tape drive and retrospect on an nForce2 chipset pc running a fairly fresh copy of XP. The system has never had a tape drive of any kind installed on it. Same problem. 320 Gig DLT drives can take a long time to reach the end of the data portion of the tape to begin writing. Retrospect is definitely timing out before the drive gets there. Since the drive is taking so long, the program thinks the drive has stopping communicating. Then it annoyingly closes the tape and wants a new tape, and wont accept the old tape without formatting it. Backup Exec doesn’t have this problem, and as I said, the test program Quantum gives away finds no faults with the drive. These SATA tape drives are fairly new on the market. Retrospect or the nVidia drivers need some tweaking. Or both. Just life on the bleeding edge, I guess... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
compdoc Posted March 5, 2006 Author Report Share Posted March 5, 2006 found the problem, finally. The drive I bought 3 weeks ago had a firmware version 5. Quantum just released version 7, which fixed the problem. Although version 6.x fixed the problem as well, Quantum never got around to releasing those versions.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
compdoc Posted April 2, 2006 Author Report Share Posted April 2, 2006 Turns out not even the bios update fixes this problem. Just for anyone out there having the same problems, I thought I'd share what I've found out about this problem: There seems to be a serious problem with DLT-V4 SATA tape drives. After backing up anything to tape, if the system is shut down without ejecting the tape from the drive, the data on the tape is no longer accessable. On next boot, when appending to the tape, the drive seeks forever. It never finds the end of the data portion of the tape. It seems as if the End of Tape marker isnt being written to the tape, or maybe the drive's buffer isnt being flushed to the tape. In any case, the tape and its data are no longer usable, unless you overwrite it or format it. If you eject the tape from the drive after each backup, or if you overwite the tape instead of appending, or never shut down the computer, the tape works perfectly. This problem occurs using Retrospect 7.0, Retrospect 7.5, and Backup Exec 10.0 (with latest updates, and with or without Veritas tape drive drivers). And it happens using the SATA controllers I tried that test perfectly with the Sage xTalk software provided by Quantum: native SATA ports on nForce2 and nForce4 chipset motherboards, and using the Promise SATAII150 TX4 controller recommended in the docs. I have tested this drive on other PCI card based SATA controllers that used SIIG chipsets, but never got them to communicate properly. They failed the Sage xTalk tests. By the way, if your drive does have the version 5 of the firmware, you might want to try to get version 7 anyway - there seems to be some serious bugs that were corrected... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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