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November 4th, 2015 11:00
PowerVault 114X LTO4 drive - frequent problem inserting tape
Our customer is having an intermittent problem with their PowerVault 114X LTO4 drive. It's a standalone drive, not a changer. The unit just turned 3 years old last month, and has been out of warranty for about a month now.
The customer is experiencing an intermittent problem when trying to insert a new tape. He's able to eject the prior night's backup tape fine, but when trying to install the next tape, it does not always pull in the next tape. The way it's being described, it's like it's hitting a hard stop on something. When this happens, he's having to power cycle the tape unit, at which point it will accept the tape.
The backup jobs themselves have been running with no problems, and the tapes will eject with no problems.
Since it's out of warranty, an out-of-warranty support call with a Dell tech is $600, and that only includes being able to talk with a tech to try to narrow down the actual problem, not fix the problem if it's a physical problem with the drive.
At this point, I'm just looking to see if anyone else has ideas on what may be causing this.
DELL-Sam L
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November 5th, 2015 13:00
Hello ETInc,
So when the tape won’t go in is there an error code # on the tape drive itself or no? If there is no error code# then do you have any amber light on the drive or just the power light? What it seems to me is that the drive is not going back to the home position after it eject the media. Now you state that once you reboot the PV114X that it starts working again so sounds like you may be running on old firmware. If you haven’t already tried to upgrade the firmware on the drive then I would give that a try. Here is a link to the firmware just incase you need it. http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=P03KR&fileId=3491208051&osCode=WW1&productCode=powervault-114x&languageCode=EN&categoryId=TH
Please let us know if you have any other questions.