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Confused Library


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Maybe someone out there has an answer to this mild annoyance: We have a Qualstar 20-tape AIT library with a single drive in it (it can accommodate two drives) and we also have a single, external, stand-alone AIT drive to use as a manual emergency substitute to the library. All are attached via an Adaptec 2940U2W card to a Dell server running Retrospect for Windows 5.6 on NT 4.0. I would like to leave everything powered up all of the time, BUT...retrospect assumes that the two drives are both installed in the Library and tries to robotically load tapes into the external drive. Is there any way to get Retrospect to understand that the 2nd drive is not in the Library? I can set the 2nd drive to "ignore" in Devices.. Environment, then the Library will function correctly, but is that the only solution, or is there a way to have the device NOT show up under the autoloader, but as another device on the same level as the loader? If I just turn the spare drive off and the server gets rebooted while the drive is powered down, then I have to reboot the server again with the drive powered up to get it to show up, and I would rather avoid that. Any suggestions?

 

Thanks in advance

 

Leon Norton

 

Craftsman Press

 

Cheverly, MD

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The SCSI ids are: Library Bus 1 ID 0, Internal Drive Bus 1 ID 1, External drive Bus 1, ID 4. If you, say, try to inventory tapes, the Library will put tape 1 into the internal drive, then try to put tape 2 into what it thinks is drive 2, fail, try to put tape 3 into drive 2, fail, try to put tape 4 into drive 2, by this time it has finished with tape 1, and will put tape 5 into drive 1, then try to put tape 6 into drive 2.....etc. The configure..devices shows both drives under the Library, instead of the library with one drive under it, and the other drive at the same device level as the library. I don't know how to fix it, if it is possible to fix.

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Try swapping out the IDs of the first two devices. Libraries and drives can sometimes exhibit strange behavior when the loader mechanism has the lower numerical ID value.

 

 

 

Also, are there any drivers loaded in NT for the drives or the library (probably called a "medium changer")? If so, try removing them- Retrospect has all its drivers contained in the application, and doesn't need the OS-loaded class drivers. Sometimes the two can conflict.

 

 

 

One more thing. If you go to Configure>Devices>Environment, is Retrospect using ASPI or NT SCSI Passthrough to see the devices?

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