I wanted to follow up on this thread since 'finally' the drive was
replaced, for the 3rd time, and is showing online. I went over the
problem with the IBM folks who used to manage things, at least they were
nice enough to help me out so I could basically look at things myself
and relay my thoughts (you could say displeasure and that would be
putting it mildly) to these people. After talking to the guy who has
been working on this it seems, as I suspected, he didn't really know
what he was doing. 

Today the drive shows up through the TS3500 Library manager the same way
as the rest. I ran cfgmgr on the AIX box and the drive shows up but it
is different. 

rmt0  Available 0A-08-02 IBM 3580 Ultrium Tape Drive (FCP)
rmt1  Available 0F-08-02 LTO Ultrium Tape Drive (FCP)

I am getting ready to redefine the drive in TSM and will see how things
work but wanted to touch base here to see what others can tell me about
this particular drive and what exactly drives how it is defined in AIX.
By the way, the firmware is at the same level as the others, it is just
the Machine Type and Model that is different.

root@cp-its-tsm1:lscfg -vl rmt0
  rmt0             U7311.D20.105964B-P1-C06-T1-W500507630041F009-L0  IBM
3580 Ultrium Tape Drive (FCP)

        Manufacturer................IBM     
        Machine Type and Model......ULT3580-TD2     
        Serial Number...............1110233696
        Device Specific.(FW)........73V1

root@cp-its-tsm1:lscfg -vl rmt1
  rmt1             U7311.D20.1054F6B-P1-C02-T1-W500507630041F005-L0  LTO
Ultrium Tape Drive (FCP)

        Manufacturer................IBM     
        Machine Type and Model......ULTRIUM-TD2     
        Serial Number...............1110067563
        Device Specific.(FW)........73V1

Geoff Gill 
TSM/PeopleSoft Administrator 
SAIC M/S-B1P 
4224 Campus Pt. Ct.
San Diego, CA  92121
(858)826-4062 (office)
(858)412-9883 (blackberry)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf
Of
> Len Boyle
> Sent: Wednesday, August 19, 2009 1:24 PM
> To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
> Subject: Re: LTO drive replacement when using switch zoning
> 
> Gill,
> 
> I suspect that the ce had the drive in service mode, either to swap
the
> drive for another one, or to run diag tests. The ce would have to take
it
> out of service mode. This can be done from the front panel of the
library.
> 
> Or some cable is not plugged into the drive unit. Of course I would
assume
> if this is the case, there are library errors generated for this.
> 
> len