Preventive Maintenance Question

For the second time in less than a month we had a critical system condition last night. Both times it occurred during our nightly backup procedure. Errors were reported for the 6384 (cartridge) tape drive and three or four of the disk drives (4326's) of which we only have four [4]. To me it is sort of funny (not in a hilarious way mind you) that the same scenario occurred (i.e., trying to use tape drive, disk errors reported).

The tape drive's error SRC was 63A09100 (a tape unit failed). The disk drive SRC's were 43263109 (May indicate a disk unit failure) and a couple of 57099030 (which I can't find). The tape drive went into FAILED status on the WRKCFGSTS *DEV display. The disk drives (three [3] last night, four [4] on 20 April) never actually failed; that is, we were able to do SAVLIB's to Save Files and FTP to a separate machine.

Both times IBM replaced one of the disk drives (we use RAID5), and the system rebuilt the disks. Speculation (my term) is that the tape drive, which is on the same bus as the disk drives (or so I was told), went into a FAILED status because the disks were sending so many errors that the bus got clogged up and ergo the tape drive timed out (or something along those lines; I wasn't taking very good notes at the time). In neither event was anything done to the tape drive, except to vary it off/on (i.e., no repairs of any kind).

Service Tools' Product Activity Log (PAL) is also showing an error (B6005120) on a 2844 device which, I think, is the RAID card (anyway, it is a card in our 520), though WRKPRB does not list it. There were five [5] of these all with the same timestamp about one [1] minute before PAL shows the 43263109 errors on the disk units.

I know that disks fail; been there, done that, got the souvenir. But I (and my boss) was wondering if it could be something less obvious causing the problem. More to the point something that could be diagnosed using some kind of hardware diagnostics tools either in our tool kit (iNav, SST, or something to which we have access), or in the CE's tool set. I'm a firm believer in "An ounce of prevention..." adage, not the "If it ain't broke..." one.


Jerry C. Adams
IBM System i Programmer/Analyst
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B&W Wholesale
office: 615-995-7024
email: jerry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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