Sounds a lot like what I was seeing when we got our "new to us" 3590E1A
drives.

The problem was the microcode level. It was way behind and caused all
kinds of grief. 2/3 of our new tapes were unlabelable. The drive would
load the tape and spin for ever until it timed out.

Once the microcode/firmware was upgraded, problems went away. Went back
and relabeled tapes that previously were unlabelable.





Thomas Denier <Thomas.Denier AT MAIL.TJU DOT EDU>
Sent by: "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU>
03/03/2003 03:30 PM
Please respond to "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager"


        To:     ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
        cc:
        Subject:        Errors on 3590 K tapes


We are running a 4.2.3.2 TSM server under OS/390. We have four 3590 tape
drives that were and are working well with 3590 J tapes (the ones with
20 GB capacity without compression). We are in the process of migrating
our onsite storage pools to 3590 K tapes (the ones with 40 GB capacity
without compression). So far we have had seven of the new tapes forced
read-only because of I/O errors. We have one full 3590 K tape, and
seventeen in 'FILLING' status that have not so far had any I/O errors.
The errors have been spread across at least three of the tape drives.
In most cases, there is an OS/390 message like the following:

IOS071I 0C62,1D,ADSM, MISSING CHANNEL AND DEVICE END

and a TSM message like the following:

ANR5351E Error reading BlockID on device 0C62.

Do 3590 K tapes typically suffer the kind of infant mortality rate
we are seeing?