Replacing A Ultrium Drive

[mattx]

Quick question which someone hopefully will be able to help me with....

 

I have ordered a new Ultrium 3 Drive to replace our Ultrium 1 Drive. [ Our backups now have to span two tapes which I don't really like doing ]

Will this be a case of a swap out, installing the new drivers and making sure Backup Exec sees the new drive, or will I have to do some fiddling with the backup exec software and actually read the manual...... ??

[strawberry]

its a bit of a faf and it required a bit of twiddling for us, but we got there in the end.

 

does this mean your ultrium 1 drive is going spare?

[mattx]

its a bit of a faf and it required a bit of twiddling for us, but we got there in the end.

 

does this mean your ultrium 1 drive is going spare?

 

Could you explain what problems you had then ?

[strawberry]

i'll give it a go, but I was looking over the shoulder of a much more experienced tech at the time!.

 

We had problems getting it to recognise the drive was there, the bios saw it, windows saw it, but backup exec couldn't see it. we ended up uninstalling the new drive and the second drive and reinstalling. Then we decieded to recreate the backup jobs just to make sure. I remember the other tech saying that is was usually a lot smoother than that but it still wasn't that tricky.

[mattx]

Thanks for the heads up on that - at least I now know that there is that aspect to look out for.

[john]

Don't forget that your LTO1 media is read only in an LTO3 drive so all new media is needed.

[mattx]

Don't forget that your LTO1 media is read only in an LTO3 drive so all new media is needed.

 

Was aware of that thanks - I double checked with HP to make sure I could still read our old tapes.....

[strawberry]

how did it go?

[mattx]

Have not done it yet - I have the new drive sitting on my desk ready to do it next week - [ its our half term ]

Will let you know all about it.....

[mattx]

Well this is rather spooky, I whipped the top off our HP ML370 - [ for the first time in almost 4 years since I built it ] - dust dust dust !!!

A quick hoover sorted that out. Pulled the old drive out, [ plus busted CD Rom ], made a note of the SCSI settings, put the new one in. As it was half height I used the busted CD Rom as a blanking plate and stuck in the new DVD writer on top of that.

Put everything back, and said a quick prayer before I pushed the power button - [ this was the first time its been without power for almost 4 years ] - IT'S ALIVE !!!

Server sprang back into life, I loaded the default set of drivers for the new tape drive, and I am now doing a full backup. [ Backup exec saw the new drive ok, I have not deleted the old one just in case ]

I don't like it though - this process went all tooooooooo smoothly - I had planned at least a few hours outage for this and it took me all of 30 mins.

 

Something is not right......

[john]

Sounds right to me, its a HP Proliant so it will just work.

[mattx]

I have to say I am impressed with the HP equipment I have used.

I normally use IBM - [ servers etc ] as thats what I dealt with in my old job.

The ML370 was the first HP server I had ever built - all I did was stick in the memory and CPUs, HD and raid card etc when we got it all those years ago and its been working ever since. Also all the switches we have are HP and not one - [ touch wood ] has ever failed.

The rack is a mixture of HP and IBM stuff but it all works together on our Domain rather well.

The new Ultrium drive also seems a little quicker - it backed up 150 gig and verified it in about 5 hours today which I thought was rather good.

 

Still went too smoothly though.......