cswenson Posted May 7, 2008 Report Share Posted May 7, 2008 I am having serious trouble with my exabyte vxa-2 autoloader. The tape device will hang during my weekend recycle backup jobs. I am using Windows 2000 server SP2 and Retrospect 7.0.326. I rotate two weeks, recycle on the weekends and do a normal backup during the week. About once a month I archive older file to tape and then to disk. On the recycle jobs, the drive hangs during an erase procedure. I am only getting the backups to work about once a month, otherwaise they burn out with an issue of some kind. Once the job hangs, there is no way to stop it other than rebooting the server, thus force quitting Retrospect. I cannot quit Retrospect through task manager. Any ideas? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eppinizer Posted May 7, 2008 Report Share Posted May 7, 2008 If you check in your history/operations log are there any errors reported? The device you are having problems with has been supported for quite a long time, so I am guessing that this is probably a configuration error with the recycle backups. How do you have those scripts set up? -Jeff Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted May 7, 2008 Report Share Posted May 7, 2008 What version of firmware do you have on the VXA-2 drive and on the AutoLoader? There are recent updates. We've got the same drive/autoloader and I'm not seeing this. Do you have the Ethernet Admin interface for this? If so, what does it show? Have you used the Exabyte tools to look at the error history? Any SCSI errors showing up in the logs? Current firmware is: VXA-2 drive: 2142 (Feb. 19, 2008) 1x10 1u PacketLoader: V1A110 (Sep. 28, 2007) As a comment, we saw Retrospect hang occasionally with our drive/autoloader when it did its device scan upon launching, and I suspect that something caused a SCSI bus init that caused a disk drive on that SCSI channel to drop an interrupt or something. The only workaround was to put the VXA-2 and autoloader on their own SCSI channel, with disks on another. That made Retrospect happy, no hangs since. Russ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cswenson Posted May 7, 2008 Author Report Share Posted May 7, 2008 Would it have anything to do with the SCSI cable being to long? The device is on it's own SCSI bus, but the SCSI cable werecieved is a 6 foot cable. I have ordered a 3 foot cable to see if it helps. I guess my next move is a new SCSI card. The wierd thing is it was working OK with a lot less errors until I updated the firmware on the drive and library to the most recent firmware. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted May 7, 2008 Report Share Posted May 7, 2008 long cables=bad Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted May 7, 2008 Report Share Posted May 7, 2008 While I think that Robin's remark is a good one, I would also suggest a good set of LVD active terminators. The one supplied with the Exabyte is OK, if that's what you are using (you do have the LVD bus terminated at the Exabyte, don't you?). Our SCSI cable is probably 6 feet long, too, because of the cable management arm in our rack. Russ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cswenson Posted May 9, 2008 Author Report Share Posted May 9, 2008 Which device's ID should be lower, the library or the tape drive? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted May 9, 2008 Report Share Posted May 9, 2008 I don't think it matters - we left ours at the default of autoloader at SCSI 0, drive at SCSI 1. See attachment from the Ethernet admin interface. Russ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cswenson Posted May 12, 2008 Author Report Share Posted May 12, 2008 (edited) I looked up the error in the event log, and it is event ID 9, source adpu160m: The device, \Device\Scsi\adpu160m2, did not respond within the timeout period. I also get: The device, \Device\Scsi\adpu160m2, is not ready for access yet. rhwalker - I do have the device terminated with the trminator supplied by Exabyte Edited May 12, 2008 by Guest Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.