When investigating LTO drive or media faults, it is often necessary to collect the logs (also known as "dumps") from the LTO drive itself.


IBM provide a graphical utility for doing this, you download a copy of it from here.

IBM's own documentation on using their utility (IBM Tape Diagnostics Tool (ITDT)), click this link to visit their site.


Here are the basics for collecting the drive dump from an attached LTO drive:

  1. Open ITDT
  2. Click on the Scan button to discover any and all attached drives
  3. Click on the drive you wish collect the logs for
  4. Click on the Dump drop-down menu item and select Dump
  5. ITDT will now collect the drive dump and display it to you in a tabbed window (to the right of the window)
  6. Click the button titled Open Log File Location... to access the log files
  7. Create a zip of the logs and send them via your preferred file transfer service (e.g. WeTransfer) and notify us at:
    1. [email protected]
  8. When we have the drive dump, we'll analyse it and get back to you with our findings.