Cannot add new tape drive to Backup Exec

[reberel]

Hello,

I am using a Dell TL4000 tape library. It has 4 drives and 4 magazines. Recently, one of the drives went bad. I bought a new drive, replaced the bad drive and restarted the library. The Dell Hardware recognizes the new drive. However, when I open up Backup Exec 2010 R3, it forces out drive 1, puts the new drive in the place of drive one, and assigns drive one a 0005 number. This is bad, because the bad drive 4 is still listed in the Backup Exec software even though I have replaced it.

Can someone let me know what I am doing wrong so I can replace drive 4? I had to put the bad drive back in so I could resume normal backup operations using the other three good drives.

Thanks,

[AmolB]

Run tapeinst.exe, it is located at root of Backup Exec installation directory

Place a check mark against "Delete entries for the tape drive that are not available"

Refer to https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.TECH17931.html

Also make sure Symantec drivers are installed for the tape drives and MS drivers for the autoloader.

[reberel]

Hi AmolB,

I think I tried this already, but I am not sure. So, when the tape backup that is running now is finished. I will try what you suggest. I will post sometime tomorrow what the results of this wilkl be.

Thank you again for your suggestion.

[Larry_Fine]

Amol's suggestions will certainly help get the remants of the old tape drive out of some places.  You may need a server reboot to get the registry fully correct.

You can also use the "Tape Drive Configuration Wizard" in BE (under Tools | Configure Devices | Configure Tape Devices...) to drag the bad drive out of the library and let the good drive into the library.

If none of that works, you may need to factory default your TL4000, but we can porbably help figure things out if you post your adamm.log file first.  Stopping the BE services and running discover.exe will also give you a good hardware view, and that output can be piped to a text file for sharing.

[reberel]

Hi Larry,

In the Tape Drive Configuration Wizard, should I drag the bad drive out first, then shut down the tape library, put in the new drive and boot it back up? Do you think that would work? Previously, when I replaced the drive, I did not do this and when I booted the drive up, it had force out drive one and put the new drive in Drive one and kept the bad one in drive 4.

Let me know if that is correct. If so, I will do this and then use AmolB's idea and remove the old one through the tapeinst.exe gui.

Thank you for the response.

[Larry_Fine]

I wouldn't do anything with the Wizard as a first step.  Hopefully, if all remnants of the old tape drive get removed from the drivers & registry area, there won't be a need for the Wizard.  It has been a while since I have used the wizard, but if you only have a single library with four drives, I don't recall if it will actually let you drag anyting in or out of the library.  BE (should) know that 4 drives belong in the library and the wizard will try to enforce that.

If you happen to produce a "missing drive" entry in the BE GUI, you can delete that from the BE GUI, as it is just another remnant of the failed drive.

Theoretically, if the library and server are powered down then the drive is swapped, it "should" be all automatic as BE discovers the new hardware.

[reberel]

I assumed the "automatic" as BE discovers the new drive and replaces the old one. It didn't seem to work that way.

[pkh · Accepted solution]

1) Go to the BE installation directory and use tapeinst.exe to delete all occurances of both the old and the new tape drives and tape libraries

2) Stop the media server and the library

3) Start the tape library

4) Start the media server

5) Ensure that the library and tape drive is recognised and functioning correctly in the Windows Device Manager. The library should appear as an Unknown Medium Changer with a Microsoft driver and the tape drive should have a Symantec driver.

6) In BE, install the library if necessary.  Go to Tools --> Wizards ---> Device Configuration Wizard to do so.

7) Target your jobs to some other device, save it and then target it to the tape library again.

[reberel]

I marked pkh's comments as the solution because I had to delete all four drives, put in a new one, reboot the tape library and the Media Server to get this to work. However, as it turns out, my problem does not appear to be a bad tape drive but a bad port on the SAS card in the Media Server.

This was not intuitive because all Backup Exec told me was is that I have a bad tape. Hence, I thought it was a bad drive since I could use the same tape in another drive and it worked fine.

Thank you all again for your help, I greatly appreciate it.