This sounds so much like a problem we had last spring that I need to speak
up. HP claimed the problem we had was quite rare, but....

Do you have SCSI disc drives on the same SCSI channel?

There appear to be disc drive problems which will cause the voltage on the
SCSI channel to fluctuate. The weirdness is the tape drive will start
reporting errors rather than the disc. Apparently most HP DDS3 drives are
very sensitive to voltage fluctuations on the SCSI channel.

Similar to your case, HP replace the back plane. They also replaced SCSI
cables, controller card and tape drive two or three times each. Errors kept
being reported for the DDS3 drive.

Finally the disc drive (for which an error had never been reported) gave out
completely. After replacing the drive and reloading the system from backup -
miracle of miracles the "tape drive" errors went away.

The only warning we ever had on the disc drive was a loud "buzzing" on
spin-up. Unfortunately, we only noticed the noise once and the drive failed
as soon as we tried to spin it up a second time to better identify the
problem.

In case you are seeing a similar problem I would suggest you verify those
backup tapes of yours and make sure they are good. Also make sure they are
truly backing up everything you need to do a full recovery. You may need
them.

-----Original Message-----
From: Cary [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, December 20, 2002 8:17 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [HP3000-L] Store errors


 Recently we have been encountering the following error almost every
night on our backup jobs:

STORE ENCOUNTERED MEDIA WRITE ERROR ON LDEV 7  (S/R 1454)
 SPECIFICALLY, STORE RECEIVED ERROR -44 FROM THE IO
  SYSTEM (S/R 1557)
 STORE/RESTORE ENCOUNTERED EXCESSIVE REWIND RETRIES ON LDEV 7.
 EXAMINE CABLE CONNECTIONS OR BUS ADDRESS  (S/R 2132)
 STORE/RESTORE ENCOUNTERED UNEXPECTED ERROR 0 FROM SUBSYS UNKNOWN
  AT LINE 123 OF PROCEDURE "TS_TAPE_DEVICE_CONTROL" (S/R 2281)
 WARNING: STORE EXPERIENCED ERROR WHILE MARKING
 MEDIA BAD ON LDEV 7 (S/R 1466)
 SPECIFICALLY, STORE RECEIVED ERROR -100 FROM SUBSYS
TS_TAPE_DEVICE_CONTROL
  (S/R 1556)

We're not sure if this is our tape drive going bad, our tapes getting
too old or what.  The System is a 979/400 running MPE/ix 5.5 and the
drive is an HP DDS3 DAT24i drive.  The drive is about 6 years old.  It
does get cleaned regularly.  Our tapes in rotation are fairly old,
too.  However, we are receiving this error when we use brand new
tapes, too.  The new tapes, however, are FUji media, not HP like our
old ones.  I don't know if the drive can tell the difference.  I'm not
sure if this is some kind of bus problem but it could be because we
recently had a failure which required having HP out here to replace
the system backplane ( a pretty major component. ) We have not powered
down the system and IPL'd the box since this started happening.  I
know that sometime clears SCSI bus problems.  Any sage advice from you
all would be greatly appreciated.

Cary

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