Tape drive problem

[anything I don't mind]

We were having problems with our tape backup over running it is a hp lto 5 and it connects over SAS. So i ran the hp proliant support pack which updates drivers etc. Now i can't get the tape drive to be picked up. Any ideas?

This is quite a big problem.

It is strange the hp array utility shows both SAS controllers and the lto 5 tape drive as connected. The device manager shows the lto 5 tape drives as fully functional. But the hp tape utility does not detect the devices and the backup software does not pick it up either.

 

[anything I don't mind]

I have not done a power off and on because I am home. I am going to go in to work tomorrow (sunday) and do a power off and on. My first thought as well.

I hope it is that simple.

It is arc serve 12 which is very old as arcserve 16 is out now. This is due for an upgrade anyway. But I would rather not "have to" upgrade as the client might see it as forced and hates being rushed to buy things. It was working ok prior to the driver updates and reboot but it was going very slow, this was the reason for the driver updates and reboots. It was over running in to the day. Going at 10mbyte a second and taking over 18 hours. But there is a chance that after reboot it may get detected in hp tape tools but still not work in arcserve.

 

[anything I don't mind]

I tried everything with this and still no luck.

I tried downgrading drivers for sas controller, lto 5 tape drive. Tried downgrading firmware on sas controller. Reboot a million times.

Contacted hp and they said that they are going to send out another tape drive but i think it is a driver or controller problem.

We have an old lto 3 drive on scsi and i plugged that in and that works right away. I am pretty much out of ideas.

 

[anything I don't mind]

Nothing fixed it. I tried everything, downgraded drivers and firmware of everything in to nearly every combination but refused to work. So i took the controllers out today and put it in to another server and installed 2008 r2 and everything worked first time without any updates.

But we are still suffering from a slow backup. This is what caused me try and update the drivers in the first place, which broke it. It may be the exchange vm needs a reboot or there is some cat 5 cable in the server room. It is going at 10mbyte a second so something is slowing it down.