[Veritas-bu] Troubleshooting Bad Drive, Error 84 and 85

MSyed AT xo DOT com writes:
> Hi All,
> I am getting "Error 84 or 85" Media Read or Write errors occassionally.
> This means that either there is something wrong with the media or the
> drives.

Or the scsi controller, cable, HBA, etc.

> There are no "clean" lights on any of my drives.  I have a Storagetek L180
> with 8 drives.
> How do I troubleshoot the drives?  In other words, can I start a manual
> backup which will direct the tape to a certain drive I want?  For example,
> let's say I want the backup to happen on drive 3, can I direct the tape to
> that drive?  Is there such a thing in Netbackup 3.4?

Down all the drives except drive 3 and it will have to be used.

> That way I can check all my drives and determine which drive is not reading
> or writing the tape correctly.  If this is a media problem, then it's a
> different story altogether.  But my suspicion at this point in time are the
> drives and troubleshooting the drives.

Check out netbackup/db/media/errors which lists date, time, mediaid,
and drive index.  Hopefully you'll find a pattern.

There are also other errors, such as recoverable errors (which NBU
would never see since they weren't hard errors reported back) which
your drive vendor may be able to help you acquire.  

> If you have any other ideas on troubleshooting the drives, please let me
> know.

Unfortunately, NBU is not going to provide a lot of info (except maybe
patterns mentioned above).  This is because it doesn't get much from
the OS.  It might receive for example a forward positioning error,
but this is all the information it receives, nothing about whether the
error came from the drive, controller, driver, etc.

> This is a Solaris 7, E450 system running Netbackup 3.4.  The media manager
> and the Netbackup master is the same system.
> Thanks
> 
> Mukarram Syed
> UNIX System Administrator
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Veritas-bu maillist  -  Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
> http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu

-- 
Larry Kingery 
        Press any key to continue or any other key to quit...