Tapes stuck

[bsek]

Hi,

Tapes are stuck in the drive every day and keep going down. I am removing manually and making it up. Is this requires drive cleaning?

Thanks in advance.

 

[johngiggs]

bsek,

Most tape drives typically have some sort of light that automatically turns on when it detects that the drive needs to be cleaned. Sometimes it is labelled "Cleaning Required" or if it is a newer drive it may just have an amber light with a status code. If the drive continues to go down, obviously there is a problem. You can start by cleaning the drive, but I would also check the backup and error logs to see if they can give you any indication as what to what is going on. Is the problem occurring with only certain brands of tapes or are specific tapes causing the problem?

John

 

[Stumpr]

recheck the drive mapping

Bob Stump
Incorrigible punster -- Do not incorrige

 

[bsek]

Thank you.
It is not a new drive. We are using that library last two years. I am using all retension tapes means nothing is new except same brand new tapes and me.

When a job started robot taking a tape from the volpool and inserting into drive 0, on the control panel I am looking 00 loaded message. On software activity monitor I am looking error message

"unable to allocate media for backup storage unit has none available [96]"

But I am sure 8 tapes are in the volume pool.

I am removing loaded tape in "00" manually. And running inventory on software end. This is happening every time a job start. Please advise.

 

[lenski]

Just because there is a tape in the volume pool that does not mean that it is eligable to be used. It could be frozen, full, have data with a differant retention span ect.. However as the tape drive is going down then it could be the tape it needs is stuck in the drive not avalible which will give the same effect. You did not give any details of the robot and drives. But we have problems sometimes with the loader. Tapes get stuck in the loader. There is only one solution and thats get Storagetek in to fix it. You say you are extracting the tape yourself but as it failes again then you are not fixing the problem so I would recomend that you get the engineers in. You may also have a bad tape there which could damage the drives if you keep using it.

 

[Stumpr]

All media available for writing are frozen in a matter of seconds causing backups to fail due to lack of media.

http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/268868.htm

Bob Stump
Incorrigible punster -- Do not incorrige

 

[bsek]

Master server configured on Windows 2000. I saw some of the tapes are in frozen state. I made those tapes available using bpmedia command. After I am starting a job manually, keep getting same error(96) message and tape is going to frozen state.

Can I do quick erase on a Tape? So I can reuse that tape.

 

[Stumpr]

There should be an entry in the logs stating WHY the tape is being frozen.
Perhaps the drive mappings changed. This happens on W2K servers.
Also check VERITAS technote # 268868

Bob Stump
Incorrigible punster -- Do not incorrige

 

[lenski]

You have to be aware there may be a good reason for the tapes being frozen and until you fix that issue there is no way forward.

 

[mrn]

I've seen this before, are new tapes being injected while tapes are in the drive?

Mike

"A foolproof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of marble, then you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant.