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Using an IBM® device driver Refer to the IBM Tape Device Drivers and Diagnostic Tool User's Guide for problem determination information speciﬁc to your host

operating system.

Using a non-IBM device

driver

See IBM Tape Diagnostic tool (ITDT). Visit https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/651133 to download the diagnostic tool.

Obtaining error information from an IBM System p

Retrieving from an IBM System i with RISC processor

Obtaining error information from an IBM System p

IBM® device drivers, for the System p operating system, logs error information when an error occurs on a tape drive or library.

The error information includes the following.

Device VPD

SCSI command parameters

SCSI sense data (if available)

The AIX® Tape and Media Changer Device Driver for System p provides logging to the system error log for various errors. You can view the error log by following this

procedure.

1. At the AIX command line, type errpt |pg to display a summary report, or type errpt -a |pg to display a detailed report. Press [Enter].

Note: Use the summary report to ﬁnd the date and time of any errors that are related to library devices. Then, use the detail report to obtain the sense data that is

needed to identify the cause of the error.

2. Press [Enter] to scroll through the error log.

3. Type q and press [Enter] to quit the error log at any time.

To correct a problem you noticed in the errpt report, determine the type of error by using the examples that follow:

For library errors [Resource Name = smcn (for example, smc0) and Resource Type = 3572-TL]), see SCSI sense data deﬁnition and the SCSI sense data in Library

sense data.

For drive errors [Resource Name = rmtn (for example, rmt0) and Resource Type = LTO], see SCSI sense data deﬁnition and locate the SCSI sense data in Tape drive

sense data.

SCSI sense data deﬁnition

The following example is of a tape drive communication failure while attached to an Open Systems host through a SAS link, with SCSI protocol. When the host detected

the failure, it built the following SCSI Sense Data record. An explanation of the SCSI Sense Data breakout in this example follows.

SENSE DATA

aabb xxxx ccdd eeee eeee eeee eeee eeee ffgg hhxx ssss ssss ssss ssss ssss ....

0600 0000 1200 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0200 0300 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000

0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000

0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000

Note: The bold area represents the SCSI Sense Data that are presented by the host. The regular font data (in this case many bytes of "zero"), designated by "ssss" would

normally contain device sense data. However, with the kind of failure in this example (COMMAND TIMEOUT), the host cannot collect valid device sense data, so zeros are

the result and are ignored. If the host was able to collect valid sense data from the drive, the ﬁrst byte “ss” would be "70", "71", "F0", or "F1", and valid device sense data

would be listed.

Detail Data

aabb xxxx ccdd eeee eeee eeee eeee eeee ffgg hhxx ssss ssss ssss ssss ssss ....

aa Length of the Command Descriptor Block (CDB) sent by the host.

In this case, “06” bytes.

bb SCSI target address. In this example, SCSI address “00”.

xx Unused or reserved.

cc Start of CDB, cc is the operation code (byte 0). In this case,

“12” which was an “Inquiry”.

SCSI sense data - library error

The following example of SCSI Sense Data was received from a System p Open System host and shows a Tape Drive Failure and what the sense data would look like.

Unlike the previous situation with SCSI sense data deﬁnition, this data contains valid sense data as deﬁned by the hex "70" in the ﬁrst sense byte position. Therefore,

instead of all zeros as in the previous example, there is valid data to rely on. While the data shows a TAPE_ERR2, it might be caused by a library failure. When you attempt

a Move Medium command ("A5"), the ASC/ASCQ points to a "Mechanical Positioning Error". For more information about sense data, see the IBM LTO Ultrium Tape Drive

SCSI Reference.

LABEL: TAPE_ERR2

IDENTIFIER: 476B351D

Date/Time: Fri May 04 42:26 DFT

Sequence Number: 1665

Machine Id: 0046083B4C00

Node Id: risc4

Class: H

Type: PERM

Resource Name: smc0 Resource Class: tape Resource Type: 3572

102 TS2900 Tape Autoloader