Question

Tape stuck in drive on Dell Powervault

Asked by: sherryfitzgroup

Hi,
I have a Dell Powervault 136T library. It has three Dell 110T 320 SDLT drives in it. One of the drives is having problems. It has a tape stuck in it and has all leds flashing. I have gone through all the dell steps to eject with no success.
Now I want to just unplug this drive and use the remaining two. If I just unplug it, should it work ok, or would I need to do some CSI config. If so, where do I do his, id it by going into the SCSi controller while the server is going through POST?

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Asked On
2009-01-09 at 09:58:10ID24039195
Tags

tape

,

backup

,

stuck

,

library

Topics

Disaster Recovery

,

Storage Technology

,

Removable Backup Media

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
5

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Answers

 

by: A2the6thPosted on 2009-01-09 at 10:30:39ID: 23338670

I haven't worked with that specific product but certainly plenty of similar products.  The short answer is, if you unplug it and reboot the machine it is connected to, you should no longer see the drive in the POST.  You may need to remove it from the device manager of your windows server.  You may also need to go into your backup application and removed the drive in there as well.  Beyond that you should be fine.

If that doesn't work, there really is no harm in leaving the drive in the system simple exclude it from your backup software as a target device.

Chace

 

by: saiprasad_kinneraPosted on 2009-01-09 at 11:52:49ID: 23339562

Untill and unless windows doesnt identify the tape drive your backups will have no issues, you dont have to configure or modify or stop anything thru software as it depends on windows to identify it.
Unplug the cable from controller and reboot and work with rest of the two drives till u get dell support to replace it :) ( m sure thtz what they basically do most of the times )

 

by: sherryfitzgroupPosted on 2009-01-09 at 14:19:48ID: 23340871

Thanks guys. I tried disconnecting it, and windows seems to recognise that there are now only 2 drives. But the tape library itself says it failed to initialise drive 1 (the disconnected drive).
When I physically remove the drive, it gives an error saying it could not teach the columns.

 

by: saiprasad_kinneraPosted on 2009-01-09 at 14:26:26ID: 23340916

you can dismount the tape drive thru LCD screen attached to the library and start working

 

by: sherryfitzgroupPosted on 2009-01-09 at 14:55:24ID: 23341120

I had to physically move drive 2 and 3 into slots 1 and 2, and remove drive 1 completely.  Now there's no error on the library. And all is well.
THanks guys

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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