Hello Everyone,

we were using an LTO4 tape drive on RHEL 6.x server, tape drive got faulty and we got replacement from Dell, new tape drive's model is "PowerVault LTO4-120HH", we rebooted the server but server didn't detect the new tape drive, I am not sure whether we need to install a device driver for the new tape drive? We are not sure what was the model of old tape drvie because of wrong service tag but new tape drive looks very different from the old one and has 2 ports at its back.

dmesg and cat /proc/scsi/scsi don't show any hint of tape drive.

Server hardware is: Dell PowerEdge R710 and OS is: RHEL 6.x

Regards,
Tayyab

I would advise you to contact Dell and/or Red Hat and ask them what the problem could be and how you can fix this.

Hello,

I contacted Red Hat but no help, local vendor of Dell was also not so useful, therefore I came on these forums to find out if anyone could guide me in right direction.

Hello Tayyabq8,
When you run the following command: cat /proc/scsi/scsi does the tape drive show up or no? Also have you tried updating the driver or firmware for the SAS 6gb card? If not then I would update the driver of the HBA as well. Here is a link to the Driver & firmware.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

---------- Post added 01-16-14 at 06:52 PM ----------

Here is the link to the drivers & firmware.

Driver: http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/...&categoryId=SE
Firmware: http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/...&categoryId=SE
Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks Sam, I'll do the update and post the results.

Second link which you have given contains following:

SASHBA_Firmware_6GBPS-SAS-HBA_07.03.06.00_A10_ZPE.exe

This is in exe format, will it work in RHEL? I don't see any other update for HBA in this link? Pls respond.

@tayyabq8: exe files won't work.

There is a RedHat version available from the second link (last block): This is a shell script.

BTW:I'm not sure if Dell_Sam_L's advise will be of any use to you.....

@tayyabq8,

Just to check: have you verified the replacement tape drive is correctly detected in the controller BIOS/configuration utility? Depending on the controller to which you've attached the tape drive, enter that configuration utility (prior to boot) and ensure the drive is seen there first.

If the drive isn't detected there then the OS certainly won't know of its presence.

You never know--it could be a faulty replacement drive. It happens...

Good luck!

1 members found this post helpful.

Hello strick1226,

yes thats what I think now, because we got another replacement tape drive yesterday and it worked fine. So I'll assume it was the tape drive which was faulty, next time I'll try to see in the BiOs config utilities if something happens like this.

For other colleagues who suggested to update HBA drive, sorry I couldn't do that due to lack of time, but I'll surely give it a try on my test system in near future because for time being this tape drive is working fine.

Regards,
Tayyab