Troubleshooting Guide
Troubleshooting Suggestions
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6. If these suggestions do not help, the tape drive may be bad and Technical Support
should be contacted.
Desktop tape drive:
1. Power down system.
2. Power cycle desktop tape drive.
3. Be sure there are no SCSI ID conflict between the tape drive and other SCSI devices.
4. Be sure you are using a proper SCSI cable and proper termination.
5. Check the SCSI cable for bent pins.
6. Try to use SCSI cable from other SCSI controller bus chain if possible.
7. If these suggestions do not help, the tape drive may be bad and Technical Support
should be contacted.
Tape Drive Recognized during System Boot but not by
Operating System or Application
Windows Operating System
When the tape drive is installed in a Windows operating system, Windows displays a message on
the screen if it does not have a driver in place for the tape drive.
If the tape drive will be used by an ISV application, you can click on the Cancel button to remove the
message. When the ISV backup software application is running, the application invokes its drivers
to run the tape drive. However, if you use a native Windows operating system backup utility, you
must install the proper tape driver for the tape drive.
Red Hat Linux
The tape driver for Red Hat Linux is called “st”. This driver is automatically installed when Red Hat
Linux is installed on your system. When Red Hat Linux boots, the operating system recognizes the
tape drive and installs the tape drive as a device in the
/dev
directory. If this is the first tape device
in the
/dev
directory, the tape drive is known as
/dev/st0 or /dev/nst0
.
There are various ways to view the log files to see whether Linux recognizes the tape drive. One
method is to open a terminal window and issue the following command from the root directory:
dmesg | grep SCSI
You may see output similar to:
(scsi0)<Adaptec AHA-294XX Ultra2 SCSI host adapter> found at PCI 0/16/0
You may also be able to use the command:
cat /proc/scsi/scsi
You may see output similar to:
Host: scsi0 Channel: 0 Id:6 Lun:00
Vendor: SEAGATE Model: ULTRIUM06242-XXX
Type: Sequential AccessANSI SCSI Revision 03
You can also use a text editor to view the messages in the file
/var/log/
andy look for tape drive
entries.
Sometimes a system may have multiple tape device names in the
/dev
directory and will not know
which st number to use. To view the st device number for your attached tape drive, use the com-
mand:
dmesg | grep tape