Frankly, I've never seen this behavior on a system that has 4 DDS drives (2
DDS-2 and 2 DDS-3) on a single SCSI controller so my question would be: is
it possible there is a lot of disk activity on the same SCSI bus as the tape
drive(s) in question?

As a workaround, you might try running Stan Sieler's ONLINE program
(available at allegro.com) from a scheduled batch job - try it manually from
a session first the next time one of these tapes fails to load completely.

John

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Art Bahrs [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 9:02 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [HP3000-L] DDS-3 Drives not registering tapes as "Write
> Enabled"
>
>
> Hi All :)
>     Ok... we are on MPE/iX 6.5 pp2 ... tho' this problem has
> been happening
> since we were on 5.5 pp7.... We are also seeing it on both
> our 979-200 and
> 928...
>
>    We mount a tape and do a SHOWDEV and there is no (W)
> displayed... take
> tape out... put tape back in and we still no (W) ... on 3rd
> or 4th try the
> tape will be Write Enabled.... cleaning tape drive doesn't
> seem to help....
>
> Any ideas... thots... Voodoo incantations? hehe
>
> Art "changine backup jobs to check write status! " Bahrs
>
>