Posts Tagged ‘Tape Backup’

What colour are the HP LTO Tape Cartridges?

Monday, November 28th, 2011

Recently I had some confusion with a client over what tape should be inserted into which tape drive and their capacity.  The colour of the tape however is what was easily determined and helped resolve the issue quickly.  I figured I’d post this for others in case they need it.  This table is accurate for HP LTO tapes – but other vendors use different colours.

LTO Size Colour
1 100GB / 200GB Blue
2 200GB / 400GB Dark Red
3 400GB / 800GB Yellow
4 800GB / 1600GB Green
5 1600GB / 3200GB Light Blue
Cleaning Cartridge NA Orange

Wikipedia has a table which has other manufacturers LTO tape cartridges and their colours here

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Tape Drive not recognised after rebooting

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

Last week on two separate Windows Server 2008 R2 servers on a clients site, both of them decided they would not correctly recognise the tape drives anymore.  These servers had not been patched in a few months (due to the onsite IT Admin) and therefore there were a large number of patches installed.  The problem showed up in Device Manager with the HP LTO Tape Drive having a yellow exclamation mark against it.  If you drill down into the device itself it gave the error message below

Windows cannot start this hardware device because its configuration information (in the registry) is incomplete or damaged. (Code 19)

At first I attempted to remove and reinstall the device but that did not resolve the issue.  I then removed the device, rebooted and let it scan the devices again – same problem – still not resolved.

In the end I did some digging with Google and found a similar case here where someone had issues with their CDROM drive playing up.  I dug deeper to find the specific key that referred to the HP LTO Tape Drive and executed the same modifications.

To resolve the issue use this procedure;

  1. Run Regedit
  2. Navigate to this key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{6D807884-7D21-11CF-801C-08002BE10318}
  3. Do an export of this key for backup purposes.
  4. Delete the LowerFilters key and reboot the server – I didn’t have an UpperFilters key but would have removed that too if I had it.

Problem solved – the device is now recognised correctly and works just fine Smile

I’m still confused however as to how this issue came about and in particular why on two nearly identical servers did it occur at the same time.  Keen to know if someone can explain this to me as I’m in the midst of creating a standard build for a client which will be used across 25 servers spread over 25 physical locations.

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Posted in Blog | 4 Comments »

Want Tape Backup for SBS 2008?

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

One of the biggest changes from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008 was the removal by Microsoft of the inbuilt support for Tape Drives as a destination for the backup utility.  Melbourne based BackupAssist has for a long time made their product take the pain out of running the inbuilt backups that Microsoft have supplied with their server products.  Recently they have released a new addition to their range in the form of support for Tape Drives with SBS 2008.  BackupAssist v5 now has the ability for us to use Tape Drives as a destination for all backups.  They talk more about the feature here

Now I’ve not had a chance to try this new support just yet, but have been using BackupAssist both personally and in our clients networks now for many years, I’m confident in the quality that Linus and his team have produced.  Give it a go – it helps us retain tape as a viable backup media for our clients networks.

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Posted in Blog | 4 Comments »