Someone asked me the following question:
When you try to back up your data to DLT tape drive,you receive error message that the tape drive is not available. This occurs even if you try a new cartbridge,what do you do?
a.Replace tape drive
b.Replace cable
c.Put tape cleaner into drive
d.Replace adapter card

He said the correct ans is b because you will also need to reboot since these are SCSI devices & are not hot swappable ports.
He also said "All books read & other tests say ans is C clean the driver,any options on here?"
So,which one is correct? I'm confused.

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I would say C
You start trouble shooting everything with the most obvious... Imagine your manager/colleague's look when you tear it apart only to discover all you have to do is to clean it...
SCSI can be hot swappable.
But then again, I dunno what is *official* answer on the test...
hmmm. question is tape drive not available. even if its the mechanism is dirty, it should still show up. Check connection is prolly the 1st step.

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I got this one on the test and I got it right
I'm gonna be a prick and not tell ya though look it up


tape backup devices are very similar to floppy drives in some ways while no you can't add a floppy drive while the computer is on you certainly can change disks. same idea with the tape backup

Imagine doing a backup and you have to reboot everytime you have to change tapes you'd be there all friggin night

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marcoyeung,
I agree with mikop,C. If you are troubleshooting start with the easiest thing which would be cleaning the tape drive. If it can't read the tape it's going to say the tape drive is not available. You can do that while it's on and then try backing it up again. If you change a cable you might have to shut the server down or reboot depending if it's an internal or external drive. I have an external AIT tape drive that will give me an error saying the tape can't be read. It's because the tape drive needs to be cleaned. I guess I'm lucky because it tells me in the Backup Exec screen and in the log. Hope this helps

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I also would go with C. Clean the drive first. It's the easiest thing to do. Then look at software. An answer not listed here but, in the real world, you might also try: reinstalling the backup software to reinitialize the tape drive. I've had to do this a couple of times with Windows 2000 Server and Veritas Backup Exec software. Then move on to hardware.

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C
I`ve seen it happen lots of times.

I always forget to use the head cleaner until it stops reading tapes

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Really chodan???

I usually just schedule a cleaning job into the backup rotation once a week. Hmmmm.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Pavlov
Really chodan???

I usually just schedule a cleaning job into the backup rotation once a week. Hmmmm.

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Actually I don`t have to worry about it anymore.
I moved on to network admin and I let someone else take care of the backups.Hmmmm.

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