sdlt tapes seen as Compac Tape III

[htoth]

Our Arcserve 2000, SP5 is seeing our Overland 4100 device with quantum sdlt 320 drives as having Compac III tapes installed, whatever those are. Both the drive and the library are on CA's certified device list. I have contacted Overland and the hardware is setup properly. Arcserve has complete control over the unit. I have run inventories on the sdlt tapes and they always come up as Compac III's. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[davidmichel]

Just to make sure I understand the library and tape drives are correctly identified, but the (unknown brand) SDLT tapes are reported as being Compaq III tapes.

Is that correct?

A Compaq III tape is a DLT type III tape, and I think the SDLT drives can read but not write to a DLT III tape. The reality is that the tape type is informational only and does not dictate how data is writtent to tape.

So test it, backup to a tape until it is full and see how much data it holds.

 

[htoth]

The tapes are Quantum SDLT 160/320 tapes. i have already run backups on the sdlt tapes and once the tape reaches about 80 GB, the unit moves on to the next tape. I have had problems before with Arcserve suddenly thinking our dlt tapes for our old dlt8000 library were 8MM, so this doesn't really surprise me. It's just that I can't fix it this time!

 

[davidmichel]

80gb is a strange amount, it does not really fit with anything. Anyways best thing is to get a tape log of it. Have a tape in the drive and startup the Tape Engine in debug faq478-3964 as soon as it has finished initilizing turn debug off. The log should help to tell what is going on.