I have and HP Storage Works Ultrium 232 LTO 1 that wont read or write to the media, i have run the backups and they keep on failing, how can i make my back ups?

SOURCE: How can I turn on/off hardware compression in Windowns 2003 Server

Hardware compression is more efficient and faster than software compression and under normal constancies you won't want to do that. Having said that if your drive allows it you would need to download and install a software utility made by your tape manufacturer. That what you will use to turn off that functionality; not a setting on the PC or the backup software. Bottom line is you will need to talk to IBM support. Probably not the answer you wanted to hear but I just went through this with HP a few months ago. They have a general purpose utility that turns off the hardware compression, does a drive analysis, a cheapo write current alignment, firmware update and a few other neat tricks.

SOURCE: HP ULTRIUM LTO 3 SCSI BACKUP FAILS

Hi

what is the drive doing or not doing?


If it is a connection problem then start by rebooting and seeing if your scsi card sees the drive in the bios and once the OS boots see if it is seen by the OS and has correct and up to date drivers.
from here
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Home.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=12169&prodSeriesId=443365&lang=en&cc=us

If the backup program also sees the drive then try a backup and see where it fails.
Is it always the same file/s?
is it usually the same distance into the tape?
Have you tried new media?

if it is a read / write problem then try a new cleaning tape as they do expire after a few uses.
Then try a brand new tape on a test backup or run the LTT HP diags program which can be found here.
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DriverDownload.jsp?pnameOID=406731&locale=en_US&taskId=135&prodSeriesId=406729&prodTypeId=12169

Just run the lto standard test program and that should tell you if it is faulty. Dont run the long tests though as they take days and are designed to really stress the drive and repeated running just wears the drive out and makes any problem worse.

If it still fails then you are going to need to send it for repair.

www.tape-drive-repair.com


Let me know how you get on

Tape-Techie

SOURCE: Ultrium LTO 3 Tape Autoloader Error

what software are you using? try not backing up the system state to see if that changes anything?

SOURCE: I have IBM ULT3580 HH4 backup tape drive want to

Have a look at the IBM Tape compatiability chart

SOURCE: Certance Ultrium 2 tape drive

Bet if you check, it is not overwritting the tape (appending) on the first tape, but will overwrite the second. Check the media properties to see. If it is this, it has probably had an update when it started going south....
Same problem here, on with Symantec about it...