Last night I installed an HP StorageWorks SDLT320 (160/320 GB) drive in a Windows 2000 Server. I used the available SCSI cable and power cable that was sitting by the empty bay that I installed it in.

The tape drive has power and shows up in device manager under tape drives and it says it's working properly, but it keeps given us a wrong media error when ever we attempt to write to a tape (which are the correct ones, and we've tried a couple).

What do you think could be causing this? Could I have installed the unit wrong? Someone at work said I may have connected it to the wrong part of the SCSI card, but the the cable was already in the board and I just used the other end to plug into the unit??? Also, if I hooked it up wrong would it show up in device manager "working properly"? We've installed the drivers as well.

I'm at a loss for what could be wrong and any help you be very much appreciate it.

Looks like the correct tape and it is configured correctly. Was this a new drive or was it purchased off of eBay or other? Have you tried cleaning it and what backup software are you using?

Is the device ID set correctly on that SCSI chain? You cannot have conflicting SDSI ID's. What media are you using in this drive?

Good, at least now I feel like it's not my fault.

The device is brand new. The tape software is: Yosemite Tapeware Backup Version 7.0.

Did a combination of several things and got it working:

1) updated all drivers
2) perform full system firmware upgrade
3) switched out SCSI cable and used one that came with unit (used in different port as well)

This seemed to do the trick.

Thanks for all the help - it's much appreciated!!!

One other question: Should the drive show up under "My Computer"?

I do not see it under "My Computer", I see the local drives, network drives, floppy and CD drive, but no tape drive.

Also, there's no way it would show up in Device Manager if the SCSI cable was installed wrong, right?

Try Windows 2000's backup utility and see if it will identify the tape. Id if were ID'd incorrectly it wouldn't boot with a conflict. This sounds like a backup software issue.

Thanks for the reply.

For the Tape Drive the Target ID is 6, the other two SCSI devices shown in Device manager (listed as: HP logical volume SCSI Disk Devices) are Target ID 4 and Target ID 5.

The media we are using is "HP Super DLTtape I 220-320GB Data Cartridge C7980A".

Does this help w/ the troubleshooting?

Here is a link to the error I get when trying to back up:

http://www.yosemitetech.com/support/...ion=viewRecord

What i can't understand is if there's a problem with the SCSI cable or it's not being terminated properly, how can the computer see the device in device manager?

You won't see it in My Computer, it's not that kind of drive. If it is seen in device manager and there are no conflicts you may want to try a different driver from HP or ask their tech support if a firmware update is in order. They may also have some insight into your configuration problem and it may be just a SCSI BIOS setting that needs to be changed. Did you try running the NT backup in Win2K to see if it recognized your tapes?