Cache-A Cleaning Light Won’t Turn Off

Storage & Archiving

Cache-A Cleaning Light Won’t Turn Off

Posted by Darren Grimsley on March 6, 2017 at 9:58 pm

I’m a newish employee in a video department at a company where archiving had kind of fallen off of the radar so I’m rebuilding the workflow so everyone can get back onboard. Part of that is going back and rearchiving the 2012-2015 data with a more organized approach then archiving all 2015-present data so I’ve been running our Cache A LTO 5 quite a bit recently.

My last tape failed and the cleaning light started flashing so I ordered a cleaning tape and ran a cycle. The light went off and everything seemed normal. When I ran my next tape through, however, it got partly through, failed, then the cleaning light came on again.

I’ve restarted the system and rescanned the drive, but can’t find anything else in the manual that gives me any clue to what the problem might be.

It seems to read ok, but I haven’t had it do a big restore in case whatever is causing this could do something to my tape.

Anybody run into a problem like this before?

Thanks,
Darren

Tom Goldberg replied 7 years, 9 months ago 2 Members · 4 Replies
4 Replies

Tom Goldberg
March 7, 2017 at 2:37 pm

Darren,

You might have just had a bad cleaning pass and could run the cleaning tape again and see how the drive behaves.

Additionally/alternatively, if you don’t mind using a command line interface, you can run the HP tape tools that are shipped with the system to drill down and understand the health of the drive. You’ll need a blank tape and to log into the linux side of the Cache-A (if you don’t know how to log in, instructions can be found at https://www.tomgoldberg.net/Cache-A/CATechBrief-CommandLine.pdf).

Once logged in, the tools can be found under /opt/ltt/hp_ltt and are menu driven. They are a bit confusing, but can be figured out or you can find instructions for them on the HP site.

Good luck.

Tom Goldberg
TGCS
30201 Rainbow Hill Rd.
Evergreen, CO 80439
mailto:tomgoldberg@gmail.com
https://tomgoldberg.net
Darren Grimsley
March 7, 2017 at 5:42 pm

I really appreciate the response. I’ll give those things a try!

How are things in CO today? I moved back to Michigan in 2015 and miss the sunshine.

Thanks,
Darren
Darren Grimsley
April 10, 2017 at 8:59 pm

Looks like we may have a bad tape causing the problem. I did another pass with the cleaning tape then used a new tape and it was fine. I then tried the original tape (new from the same shipment) I had been using when the error happened and I had the same problem where there was an error and the cleaning light came on. I put the first tape back in and all was fine.

Another problem that’s cropped up is that I had to replace a failed drive in the raid. I put it in and, after not seeing any dialog boxes, left it alone to see if it would rebuild itself. It didn’t and when I went into the terminal today to see if changing the raid type would help, it said “Second HDD is missing (/dev/sbd)”.

I took the drive out and it was hot like it had been running. Is there something I need to do to ensure that the Cache-A is seeing the drive?

Thanks,
Darren
Tom Goldberg
April 10, 2017 at 9:35 pm

Darren,

I’m sorry to advise that the Cache-A won’t automatically rebuild a failed RAID onto a new unformatted drive, it needs to be specifically partitioned for the job.

Please contact me off forum at the address below for further help.

Regards,
Tom

Tom Goldberg
TGCS
30201 Rainbow Hill Rd.
Evergreen, CO 80439
mailto:tomgoldberg@gmail.com
https://tomgoldberg.net

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