Tape Library going offline but AIT drives aren't

[John_Grist]

We have a Qualstar 4212 tape library with two Sony AIT-2 tape drives installed. It is attached to an IBM xSeries 330 server via an Adaptec SCSI adapter. The OS is Windows 2000 server with SP4, hotifxes and the SP4 rollup applied. Within the last 5 days, the robotic library has twice gone "off-line" within Veritas BE 8.6, but the tape drives have not.

Rebooting doesn't seem to help - however, manually stopping and restarting the BE services does bring the robotic library back on-line.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

John Grist
City of Amarillo, Texas

[Michael_Sisolak]

By SP4 rollup do you mean the recently released "Windows 2000 Update Rollup 1 for Service Pack 4"? We also have a Sony tape library and found that as soon as we installed the Rollup that the tape library would only be seen as "offline" (even though the Sony diagnostic tools show everything as fine). As soon as we uninstalled the Rollup the library popped right online. Try removing the Rollup and see what happens. We have yet to find a better solution than that unfortunatley. Given that Veritas 8.x is unsupported there may be little hope for a better fix.

[Steven_English]

Here a thought.

Do either of you use Veritas device drivers or manufatures drivers of the drives?

I have found out that the Veritas drivers cause more problems that it resolves with AIT hardware..