If you are having leader problems then I would hazard a guess you are
talking about SDLT drives...


We get that every now and then on our SDLT320 system. And for us the
cause is usually a single bad tape cartridge - as it is being loaded the
little metal bar on the end of the leader strap in the drive is failing
to engage the leader hook at the end of the tape and the drive gets
broken by this and needs your engineer to re-thread the leader...

The problem will keep happening until you find that tape and remove it
from the library...     Look back through you daemon.log for the tapes
being loaded and find the tape or tapes that are being tried over and
over again - then look at the tapes and see if the little take-up hook
is bent....

Legato really gets in a mess when this happens because it's logic means
that it tries the bad tape in each drive in turn and very efficiently
disables every single drive in a few hours....

The bad tape can sometimes be fixed by bending the hook back into shape
- but my advice is to get rid of the tape if you can. I suspect the
reason these tapes go bad is because they've been dropped hard on the
floor, but naturally I don't have proof of that ;-).



-----Original Message-----
From: EMC NetWorker discussion [mailto:NETWORKER AT listserv.temple DOT edu] On
Behalf Of Luiz Casey
Sent: Friday, 29 September 2006 1:33 AM
To: NETWORKER AT listserv.temple DOT edu
Subject: [Networker] Random errors.

We have been having several problems with 7.2. running on Solaris 10. 
Currently we have 3 drives  in service mode. We ran an nsrjb -HHE on
them to clear them out and renabled them.  It then attempted to mount a
new tape for labeling, an old tape for appending, and a recyclable tape
for re-labeling.  All three of these operations resulted in I/O errors.
Much of what we saw earlier. We had a hardware tech come out a couple
days ago and tell us it was a "leader" problem. He reset the leader on
the drives and told us it was caused my bad tapes. Could this be more of
the same 
"leader" problem we were having ??   We also have had problems where it 
would finish writing the tapes and  we would have to manually unmount
the tape.  Also some tapes would get stuck on "verifying the label" this
happens on random drives and random tapes. Just today a new tape got
mounted for automatic labeling and failed, so we reset_device and it
re-ran the process automatically and it worked.

Any suggestions, ideas, comments would be great. Also let me know if you
need additional information.

-Luiz


Luiz Casey
lcasey AT american DOT edu

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