Rolf,

The details about the reason for the 'status 84' will be visible in
BPTM, BPBRM and BPBKAR. Collect those at a reasonable verbosity, then
send them to me.

In order of frequency, the causes are:

Bad Drive/Cable/HBA/SCSI card
Drive needs (proper) cleaning (and you CAN kill a drive while cleaning
it)
Tape device driver competes with something
Network error (you'll see 10054 errors in BPBKAR)

The latter can be caused by improper duplex settings on switch and
driver. Go to 100MB/FullDuplex and the latest driver for your NIC.

If you suspect the hardware, add 'VERBOSE' to
<instaldir>/veritas/volmgr/VM.conf and create the log directories for
the Volume Manager deamons. I had a good KB article for this, I'll mail
it to you when I find it. Creating LTID might be a good start. The
setting in VM.conf will blow your eventviewer full with messages, one of
them might give a clue to whether your hardware is failing or not.

Succes,

Marcel van Drunen
UNISYS