BE 9.0 rev 4202 - DLT TAPE DRIVE SWAP – Any likely problems?

[RICHARD_REMP]

DLT TAPE DRIVE SWAP – Any likely problems?

I’m about to swap an ADIC DS9700D DLT tape drive which has become unreliable (it frequently loses contact with our Backup Exec software (ver 9.0 rev 4202) - error msg: “unable to open target media device”.

The drive within the Sun Microsystems housing appears the same (same labels, lights and door lever) as the drive in the ADIC housing.

I’ve changed the SCSI address (5) to match the previous drive.  I expect to down the NetWare ( ver 6 rev 03) server housing the Backup Exec software, connect the Sun Micro drive to the SCSI cable, power up the tape drive, and then bring the server back up.

Are there any “gotchas” or possible problems I should consider before doing this?  (I understand that the SCSI cable is a possible source of the connectivity probems and will replace that if the drive swap works but doesn’t improve the connectivity problem.)

Clearly I need to be able to restore data from existing back up tapes.

I’ll certainly appreciate any suggestions, cautions or observations about this matter.

Thank you.

  -Richard Remp

[Sush---]

I’ve changed the SCSI address (5) to match the previous drive.  I expect to down the NetWare ( ver 6 rev 03) server housing the Backup Exec software, connect the Sun Micro drive to the SCSI cable, power up the tape drive, and then bring the server back up.

From the above information it seems that you ARE following the correct steps and I dont think that it should have any problems.

Also before you change the drive I would recommend you to check the Hardware Compability List (HCL) of BE ver 9.0.  Following is the link for HCL:

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH46795

Do let me know if all goes well.

Thanks,

-Sush... 

[CraigV]

There might be a problem when detecting the drive. To be honest, whenever I do that, I always run the Device Configuration Wizard and reinstall the Symantec drivers. This gets that bit of troubleshooting out of the way.

There is always something about a new drive that causes issues with BE...could be serial number, different firmware, name (default name of the drive...) etc...running that wizard generally sorts it out.

[Larry_Fine]

So this is Backup Exec for NetWare 9.0?  Your procedure sounds like a good start and the best practice, but you may still have some tweaking to do when BENW discovers the new drive.

[Sush---]

Any updates on this post?? If all is working fine please mark the solution and close the post..?

Thanks,

-Sush...