Error -102 (trouble communicating) when appending to a SCSI tape

[johnxsmith]

I frequently encounter Error -102 (trouble communicating) when appending to a 35GB DLT tape after writing approximately 30GB during the initial backup.

 

I found an old forum subject which deals with the same message at http://forums.dantz.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=professional&Number=19627&Forum=professional&Words=-102&Match=Entire%20Phrase&Searchpage=0&Limit=100&Old=allposts&Main=17597&Search=true#Post19627. It contains some obvious boilerplate about how to handle the issue, so I'll describe the problem by referencing items discussed by the boilerplate.

 

1) The tape drive heads have been cleaned. The failure has occurred before and after the cleaning.

 

2) The SCSI bus contains only one device, an external tape drive.

 

3) Originally, ASPI was not installed correctly according to ASPICHK, so I ran ASPIINST.exe. A rerun of ASPICHK confirmed that ASPI was then installed correctly. The problem still occurs.

 

4) The failure occurs whether or not NT SCSI Passthrough is enabled.

 

5) I'm running Windows XP. The manufacturer (Adaptect) does not have any Windows XP drivers for the card, so I can only assume that the drivers which come with Windows XP are adequate and current. When I run Windows Update, it does not recommend any SCSI driver updates.

 

6) That's impractical

 

7) Believe it or not, but I have had this problem with three different tape drives. Because of this message, I had assumed that the problem "must" be hardware. Now I think otherwise.

 

Here are some more pieces of information:

 

8) The failure has occurred when using several different tapes.

 

9) In an attempt to resolve any SCSI voodoo issues, I have tried different cables and cable adapters. That didn't make a difference.

 

10) Sometimes, I can append once or twice to a tape before the problem occurs. Once it begins, it seems to be persistent no matter what I do.

 

11) I have tried other backup software, and it has yet to encounter an analogous problem. Of course, there is no way of knowing if it encoutered the same situation with the tape drive. I did find it strange to see that it can take nearly three hours to find the end of the tape. Retrospect does not seem willing to wait that long. Preferences + Media + Request specifies a "Media request timeout" value of (never).

[AmyJ]

If you've tried three different tape drives, multiple tapes and cables and the drive(s) is still generating hardware errors, this could indicate a problem with the SCSI card or the computer. This is why moving the drive to another computer is important - to see if the problem follows the drive. If the drive works fine on another computer, you may have a problem with the SCSI card and/or other computer hardware.