Hpe Storeever 1 8 G2 Tape Autoloader Windows Driver
Breanna Mangels
We have a Windows 2012 R2 serve with a HP StoreEver MSL2024 autoloader attached. It was all working ok until it randomly started going offline in Backup Exec 2014. In device manager the Tape drive was showing up as HP Ultrium 5-SCSI SCSI sequential device and the medium change was showing up as "Unknown medium changer".
I thought that changing to the HP Ultrium 5 drivers from HP for the autoloader might fix this issue (I should have read more before I did this as I know this is wrong now) but now the tape drive is showing up as Hewlett Packard LTO Ultrium-5 drive and no medium changer shows up at all.
How can I first get the right drivers back on to the tape drive (the generic Microsoft ones) and then secondly how can I get the medium changer showing up again? Then how can I get BE detecting the autoloader properly?
Is there any way of doing the above steps without shutting down? The BE server is in a datacentre and if I shut down the tape library I won't be able to start it again without physically going to the datacentre. If there's no other way I can travel there, but just checking first.
Should the medium changer appear in device manager even if it doesn't have the right drivers? I have read one forum post where the changer was hidden from the OS because it was changed to sequential instead of random mode. I've checked this as well, the library is in random mode.
So there might be something wrong with the medium changer? I can't see any errors in the HP Command View console for the tape library. I've tried rebooting the tape library as well, it came back fine but still doesn't show in device manager anymore.
I'd also recommend downloading HP Library and Tape Tools and running it against the library to rule out hardware issues. Just stop the BE services before doing so. Also make sure the cable used isn't perhaps damaged!
WIth the tape drive I've gone ahead and installed the HP OEM drivers (mistake) and even when I uninstall the tape drive from device manager, reboot the server, it reappears again with the same drives after I log in.
pkh - I can do reboots of the server and of tape drive, just can't do a full power off as I don't beleive there's any iLO type function on the tape drive to turn it back on again unless I go to the data centre.
I noticed that tape loader number 1 (listed as LUN) inside HP command view was saying "Not Ready, Not connected" so I restarted the tape drive again and checked the status of tape loader 1 again and it said "Connected and online". I then restarted the server after that. When the server came back online, I checked device manager and Medium Changer devices was listed. There was also now two HP LTO Ultrium-5 drives listed under "Tape Drives". This seems fine because we have two tape drives.
It was listed as "Hewlett Packard MSL G3 Series library (x64 based)". I changed it to "Unknown Medium changer" as advised and rebooted the server again. When it came back online it had changed back to the "Hewlett Packard MSL G3 Series library (x64 based)" listing.
I thought I'd give BE a try anyway, and BE discovered the robotic library, and the tape drives attached. I ran an initialize and it worked. I am now running a test job and it's 150gb into the job with no errors.
You probably need to actually remove the HP drivers (medium changer and tape drive) from the system, not just disable/uninstall the device from device manager. Once HP drifvers are on the hard disk, Windows and/or HP will keep trying to "help you" with help that you do not want.