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Tape erase results in SCSI timeout- who to blame?


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Using Server 7.5 on XP with a new VXA-320 tape drive and a new Adaptec 29160... the system handled its first few tapes fine, but now whenever a new tape is added to a backup set or an existing tape is recycled the operation fails with his fails with a "Couldn't erase tape, error -102 (trouble communicating)" and there's a SCSI error in the event log.

 

Watching the tape drive, it appears to continue the erase operation past the point where Retrospect gives up. We've replaced the SCSI cable to make sure that's not the problem (it's not).

 

Any ideas? I'm not sure who to blame.

 

-R

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You don't say which VXA-320 drive or your firmware rev level. If it's the Exabyte VXA-320, the most recent firmware (of September 1, 2006):

Exabyte VXA-320 firmware

may address that because it addresses some timeout issues. When we got our Exabyte drive and autoloader, the firmware updates fixed some issues we were having.

 

We've also seen some issues with the Exabyte error recovery routines when it tries to read the tape header on insertion, and cleaning the tape drive very frequently (every 10 hours of use or prior to every new tape) has lessened that problem.

 

Russ

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