Actually, we do have one external drive on this SE SCSI channel, along with
a CD-ROM drive.  Everything else is on the Differential channel.  Our back
plane situation came about during a tragic affair in which our local power
company advised us they would be turning off the power to our building for 8
hours.  Our UPS wouldn't hold out that long, so we decided to power down and
unplug.  The 3000 hadn't been physically turned off and unplugged in over
three years.  We were ready when the power was supposed to go out and it
never did.  After three hours, we call them and they say, "well, if your
power hasn't gone out, it's not going to...."           idiots.....

Upon starting the system back up, the first thing I did was turn on our one
external drive and HASS enclosures.  The power supply failed on the external
drive and it would not power on or spin up.  I didn't go any further.  HP
came in, replaced the power supply and the drive spun up fine....whew!
Then we powered on the 3000 and that's when what the tech called the "logic
circuit" on the system back plane failed and the system would not go past
the "PROCEEDING TO TURN DC POWER ON" display.    I was beside myself.  The
whole incident set us back about $5000 and it was all because of a planned
power outage that never occurred.  At least we didn't have to do a
reload......

Your story scares me to death, but I don't think that's what my problem is
because these errors on the tape drive started happening after the back
plane was replaced, not before.  The drive is 6 years old and has probably
lasted as long as anyone has ever had one last....

Time for a new one.

-----Original Message-----
From: Atwood, Tim (DVM) [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, December 20, 2002 10:35 AM
To: 'Cary'; [log in to unmask]
Subject: RE: [HP3000-L] Store errors


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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